"There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the...

It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
~ Alain de Botton ~












It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you ha...
Show MoreMore Alain de Botton quotes
"The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in ...
"Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.
"There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
"A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
"Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.
"The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) tha...
"When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourse...
"...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are ...
"There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much ki...
"Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the fam...
"Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering wh...
"However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, cons...
"The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the...