Top 100 Botton's 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. 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
#3. To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
Alain De Botton
#4. Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good doing bad and it's nice to help someone.
Alain De Botton
#5. It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
Alain De Botton
#6. Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
Alain De Botton
#8. You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.
Alain De Botton
#9. The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
Alain De Botton
#10. I just got my first bikini. It's a three-piece: a top, a botton, and a blindfold for you.
Wendy Liebman
#11. Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres's portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.
Alain De Botton
#12. Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain De Botton
#13. A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It's almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
Alain De Botton
#14. In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.
Alain De Botton
#15. 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
#16. You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
Alain De Botton
#17. 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
#18. There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
Alain De Botton
#19. 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
#20. Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.
Alain De Botton
#21. 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
#22. The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
Alain De Botton
#23. Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
Alain De Botton
#24. I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as it seems only polite to do so. But at heart it's absurd; we should band together against the big common enemies.
Alain De Botton
#25. I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to pay their way. It's like a monastery in a way, and that beautiful refuge has been destroyed by dogma about what this stuff is for.
Alain De Botton
#26. It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, 'I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.'
Alain De Botton
#27. I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Alain De Botton
#28. A thought provoking number of the world's most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead.
Alain De Botton
#29. Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
Alain De Botton
#30. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
Alain De Botton
#31. It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
Alain De Botton
#32. Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
Alain De Botton
#33. It is easy to get upset about the deteriorating state of one's body, but there are other ways to excel and impress than via one's legs.
Alain De Botton
#34. I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Alain De Botton
#35. If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.
Alain De Botton
#36. Work is a way of bringing order to chaos, and there's a basic satisfaction in seeing that we are able to make something a little more coherent by the end of the day.
Alain De Botton
#37. After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
Alain De Botton
#38. A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain De Botton
#39. We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained.
Alain De Botton
#40. Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can't afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
Alain De Botton
#41. One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
Alain De Botton
#42. It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
Alain De Botton
#43. In Flaubert's eyes, that only entirely illiterate and uneducated Frenchmen now stood a chance of being able to think properly:
Alain De Botton
#44. I know one of the secrets the rest of the country hasn't figured out yet: it's not New Yorkers who are rude, it's the tourists who've seen a movie about rude New Yorkers and think they have to act the same way when they come to New York who are rude.
Sari Botton
#45. Jesus sleeping in his mother's arms subliminally reinforce his counsel that we should learn to regard all our fellow human beings as if they were children.
Alain De Botton
#46. When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
Alain De Botton
#47. Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain De Botton
#48. Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should.
Alain De Botton
#49. Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others.
Alain De Botton
#50. 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
#51. We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
Alain De Botton
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
Alain De Botton
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.
Alain De Botton
#66. True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
Alain De Botton
#68. Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
Alain De Botton
#69. 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
#70. One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Alain De Botton
#71. The average citizen now has near-instantaneous access to information about events in every nation on earth.
Alain De Botton
#72. 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
#73. 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
#75. We've also been forced to learn something rather more surprising: no one is particularly interested.
Alain De Botton
#76. 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
#77. Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain De Botton
#78. In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"
Alain De Botton
#79. By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.
Alain De Botton
#80. In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
Alain De Botton
#81. It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers.
Alain De Botton
#82. A work of tragedy would rise to its true moral and edifying possibilities when the audience looked upon the hero's ghastly errors and crimes and was left with no option but to reach the terrifying conclusion: 'How easily I, too, might have done the same.
Alain De Botton
#83. Even if the whole of the man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modelled to rival St Mark's Square, even if we could spend the rest of our lives in the Villa Rotonda or the Glass House, we would still often be in a bad mood. 7.
Alain De Botton
#84. In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain De Botton
#85. To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.
Alain De Botton
#86. There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Alain De Botton
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
Alain De Botton
#90. 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
#91. Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.
Alain De Botton
#92. There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
Alain De Botton
#93. The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.
Alain De Botton
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
Alain De Botton
#99. 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
#100. 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
