Botton Quotes

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

They pine for the hip, frosty girlfriend they abandoned for a pleasant if unexciting marriage to her sunnier, less mentally present sister coast. — Sari 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

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference. — Alain De Botton

Change is seen as something evil only by those who have lost their youth or sense of humor." That was Cookie Mueller on the East Village, 1985. The — Sari 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

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life. — Alain De Botton

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else. — Alain De Botton

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home. — 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

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

The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice. — Alain De Botton

yet men die miserably every day — 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

If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen. — 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

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards. — 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

Most good thinking has its origin in fear. — 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

we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds. — 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

The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer. — 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 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

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

It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser, though he has lost and I think that is the lesson of tragedy. — Alain De Botton

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe. — Alain De Botton