Alain De Botton Quotes
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Alain De Botton Quotes & Sayings
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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
— Alain De Botton
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
— Alain De Botton
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
— Alain De Botton
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
— Alain De Botton
I did not live Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise
— Alain De Botton
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
— Alain De Botton
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
— Alain De Botton
it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved.
— Alain De Botton
Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.
— Alain De Botton
Page 25 "But if we accept the legitimacy of the subject nevertheless, then a new and contentious series of questions at once opens up.
— Alain De Botton
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
— Alain De Botton
We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
— Alain De Botton
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
— Alain De Botton
As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
— Alain De Botton
We charm by coincidence rather than design.
— Alain De Botton
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
— Alain De Botton
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
— Alain De Botton
Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
— Alain De Botton
Alcohol-inspired fights ... are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
— Alain De Botton
Sunday evenings had long saddened me, reminders of death, unfinished business, guilt, and loss.
— Alain De Botton
Writing isn't a career choice. It's self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
— Alain De Botton
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
— Alain De Botton
In hock to the excitements and commercial advantages of rage, the news cruelly ignores the project of consolation.
— Alain De Botton
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
— Alain De Botton
It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved
— Alain De Botton
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
— Alain De Botton
[W]e all incline in astonishingly personal ways to idiocy and spite
— Alain De Botton
Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape ...
— Alain De Botton
Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
— Alain De Botton
We are creature deeply marked by our expectations
— Alain De Botton
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
— Alain De Botton
To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song.
— Alain De Botton
We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
— Alain De Botton
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
— Alain De Botton
Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.
— Alain De Botton
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
— Alain De Botton
Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
— Alain De Botton
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
— Alain De Botton
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
— Alain De Botton
The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
— Alain De Botton
yet men die miserably every day
— Alain De Botton
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
— Alain De Botton
You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.
— Alain De Botton
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
— Alain De Botton
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.
— Alain De Botton
You're not upset.' 'I am.' 'You deserve to be.
— Alain De Botton
Web traffic figures for the BBC news website:
— Alain De Botton
Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
— Alain De Botton
He considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence.
— Alain De Botton
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.
— Alain De Botton
One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with
— Alain De Botton
We will have nothing substantial to offer anyone else so long as we have not first mastered the art of being patient midwives to our own thoughts.
— Alain De Botton
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
— Alain De Botton
He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.
— Alain De Botton
The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray.
— Alain De Botton
If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.
— Alain De Botton
The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.
— Alain De Botton
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
— Alain De Botton
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
— Alain De Botton
When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.
— Alain De Botton
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
— Alain De Botton
Bowie Comeback Makes Top 10 Singles Chart 2.52M
— Alain De Botton
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
— Alain De Botton
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
— Alain De Botton
I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.
— Alain De Botton
There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.
— Alain De Botton
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
— Alain De Botton
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
— Alain De Botton
The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.
— Alain De Botton
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
— Alain De Botton
BOREDOM IS A new challenge and responsibility.
— Alain De Botton
We've also been forced to learn something rather more surprising: no one is particularly interested.
— Alain De Botton
...love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.
— Alain De Botton
A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.
— Alain De Botton
Must being in love always mean being in pain?
— Alain De Botton
Memory is ... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
— Alain De Botton
Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine.
— Alain De Botton
Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
— Alain De Botton
Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.
— Alain De Botton
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole ...
— Alain De Botton
People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
— Alain De Botton
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
— Alain De Botton
Confinement. This morning the plane was over the Malay peninsula,
— Alain De Botton
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
— Alain De Botton
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
— Alain De Botton
The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
— Alain De Botton
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
— Alain De Botton
(disliking people rarely being a sufficient reason for not wanting them to like us).
— Alain De Botton
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
— Alain De Botton
Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
— Alain De Botton
East DR Congo Faces Catastrophic Humanitarian Crisis 4,450
— Alain De Botton
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
— Alain De Botton
Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
— Alain De Botton
A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
— Alain De Botton