Top 100 Alain De Botton Quotes
#1. In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it ... a wild book.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#2. We seek abroad what is missing in our own lives, what we hunger for in vain at home. (Alain de Botton)
Scott Driscoll
#3. Essayist and philosopher Alain de Botton describes art as an apothecary for the soul.
Arianna Huffington
#4. The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away - to go, as he concluded, 'anywhere! anywhere! so long as it is out of the world!
Alain De Botton
#5. We've also been forced to learn something rather more surprising: no one is particularly interested.
Alain De Botton
#7. The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.
Alain De Botton
#8. It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
Alain De Botton
#9. The average citizen now has near-instantaneous access to information about events in every nation on earth.
Alain De Botton
#10. One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Alain De Botton
#11. But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?
Alain De Botton
#12. Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
Alain De Botton
#14. True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
Alain De Botton
#15. But I could I tell her so in a way that would suggest the distinctive nature of my attraction? Words like "love" or "devotion" or "infatuation" we're exhausted by the weight of successive love stories, but the layers imposed on them through the uses of others.
Alain De Botton
#16. Pronounce a lover 'perfect' can only be a sign that we have failed to understand them. We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.
Alain De Botton
#17. Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Alain De Botton
#18. Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
Alain De Botton
#19. We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
Alain De Botton
#20. Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.
Alain De Botton
#21. These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
Alain De Botton
#22. The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
Alain De Botton
#23. Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.
Alain De Botton
#24. Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to enquiries about how we're doing.
Alain De Botton
#25. 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
#26. It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Alain De Botton
#27. 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
#28. I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
Alain De Botton
#29. With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.
Alain De Botton
#30. I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.
Alain De Botton
#31. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain De Botton
#32. You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain De Botton
#33. Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
Alain De Botton
#35. The beginning of revolutions is psychologically strikingly akin to that of certain relationships: the stress on unity, the sense of omnipotence, the desire to eliminate secrets (with the fear of the opposite soon leading to lover's paranoia and the creation of a secret police).
Alain De Botton
#36. The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.
Alain De Botton
#37. There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
Alain De Botton
#38. Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.
Alain De Botton
#39. Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
Alain De Botton
#40. And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
Alain De Botton
#41. To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Alain De Botton
#42. 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
#43. Memory is ... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain De Botton
#44. The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Alain De Botton
#45. There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.
Alain De Botton
#46. The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain De Botton
#47. Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Alain De Botton
#48. The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
Alain De Botton
#49. A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
Alain De Botton
#50. One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
Alain De Botton
#51. It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
Alain De Botton
#52. The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
Alain De Botton
#53. Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain De Botton
#54. What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
Alain De Botton
#55. 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
#56. Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Alain De Botton
#57. Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
Alain De Botton
#58. Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
Alain De Botton
#59. I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain De Botton
#60. There are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.
Alain De Botton
#61. Rejection hurts so much because we take it as a damning judgement passed not merely on our physical appeal but on our entire selves, and by extension (at this stage we're crying into our pillow, as something by Bach or Leonard Cohen plays on the stereo) on our very right to exist. 2.
Alain De Botton
#62. Crucial insights that we need to convey to ourselves can often be received only at night, like city church bells that have to wait until dark to be heard. During
Alain De Botton
#63. Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain De Botton
#64. We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain De Botton
#65. There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
Alain De Botton
#66. Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
Alain De Botton
#67. E may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide.
Alain De Botton
#68. Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain De Botton
#69. If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes.
Alain De Botton
#70. Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain De Botton
#72. Year-end financial statements ... express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
Alain De Botton
#73. There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.
Alain De Botton
#74. Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.
Alain De Botton
#75. A grasp of the psychological mechanism behind taste will not necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don't like with simple disparagement
Alain De Botton
#76. A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
Alain De Botton
#77. People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
Alain De Botton
#78. Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
Alain De Botton
#79. We shouldn't be surprised if this kind of stoicism is of no interest whatsoever to the news, for it has sound commercial incentives for overemphasizing our vulnerability.
Alain De Botton
#80. Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
Alain De Botton
#81. For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
Alain De Botton
#82. How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.
Alain De Botton
#83. A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Alain De Botton
#84. By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
Alain De Botton
#85. We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.
Alain De Botton
#86. How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
Alain De Botton
#87. 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
#88. The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
Alain De Botton
#89. 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
#90. The great fortunes of our day have rarely been accumulated through the sale of the most meaningful items and services, such as poetry or relationship counselling.
Alain De Botton
#91. Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.
Alain De Botton
#92. There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Alain De Botton
#93. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.
Alain De Botton
#94. Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love. Children
Alain De Botton
#95. What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.
Alain De Botton
#96. 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
#97. Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.
Alain De Botton
#98. If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.
Alain De Botton
#99. 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
#100. So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain De Botton
