We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time – inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb.

— Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton Quotes

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

— Alain de Botton

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

— Alain de Botton

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

— 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

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

— Alain de Botton

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.

— Alain de Botton

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

— Alain de Botton

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.

— 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

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

— 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

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

— Alain de Botton

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

— Alain de Botton

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

— Alain de Botton

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

— Alain de Botton

Let’s say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, ‘I’ve come here because I’m in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,’ – they would show you the way to the insane asylum.

— Alain de Botton

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another’s fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

— Alain de Botton

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed – but survivable.

— Alain de Botton
More Alain de Botton Quote >>
Privacy Policy   7.20ms  0.70MB