Botton Quotes & Sayings

In a more evolved world, one a little more alive to the Greek ideal of love, we would perhaps know to be a bit less clumsy, scared, and aggressive when wanting to point something out, and rather less combative and sensitive when receiving feedback. The concept of education within a relationship would thus lose some of its unnecessarily eerie and negative connotations. We would accept that in responsible hands, both projects - teaching and being taught, calling attention to another's faults, and letting ourselves be critiqued - might — Alain De Botton

(disliking people rarely being a sufficient reason for not wanting them to like us). — Alain De Botton

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say ... but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence. — Alain De Botton

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life. — Alain De Botton

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life. — Alain De Botton

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives. — Alain De Botton

The only problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos. — Alain De Botton

The incident emphasizes once more that beauty is something to be found, rather than passively encountered, that it requires us to pick up on certain details, to identify the whiteness of a cotton dress, the reflection of the sea on the hull of a yacht, or the contrast between the color of a jockey's coat and his face. — Alain De Botton

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol. — 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

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available. — Alain De Botton

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate. — Alain De Botton

Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all those with a take on the future of the potato crisp, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.
Our era is perverse in passing off an exception as a rule. — Alain De Botton

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

a lack of love:
between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself. — Alain De Botton

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

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children. — Alain De Botton

I can't understand people who don't like chocolate. I was once going out with a
guy, this guy Robert I was telling you about, and I was never really
comfortable with him, but I couldn't work out why. Then one day it all became
clear: he didn't like chocolate. I mean he didn't just not love it, this guy
actually hated it. You could have put a bar in front of him and he wouldn't
have touched it. That kind of thinking is so far removed from anything I can
relate to, you know. Well, after that, you can imagine, it was clear we had to
break up. — 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 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

There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau: to give them more money or to restrain their desires. — Alain De Botton

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

There is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry. — Alain De Botton

It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher. — Alain De Botton

We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other's powers in a curious sort of homage - heard in adult life decades down the line - to a small child's awe at their own parents' apparently miraculous capacities. To — Alain De Botton

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

Ruskin's interest in beauty and in its possession led him to five central conclusions. First, beauty was the result of a number of complex factors that affected the mind both psychologically and visually. Second, humans had an innate tendency to respond to beauty and to desire to possess it. Third, there were many lower expressions of this desire for possession (including, as we have seen, buying souvenirs and carpets, carving one's name on a pillar and taking photographs). Fourth, there was only one way to possess beauty properly, and that was by understanding it, by making oneself conscious of the factors (psychological and visual) responsible for it. And last, the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so. — Alain De Botton

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to ...
How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object
whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug
and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see. — Alain De Botton

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

East DR Congo Faces Catastrophic Humanitarian Crisis 4,450 — Alain De Botton

Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back. — Alain De Botton

Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love; its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner's way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these junctures. It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love's collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation. — Alain De Botton

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

To live in modernity
an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news
is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory. — Alain De Botton

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

And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain. — 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

Interest did not naturally belong to such anecdotes. For the most part, only Chloe and I appreciated them, because of the subsidiary associations we attached to them. Yet these leitmotifs were important because they gave us the feeling that we were far from strangers to one another, that we had lived through things together, and remembered the joint meanings we had derived from them. However slight these leitmotifs were, they acted like cement. The language of intimacy they helped to create was a reminder that (without clearing our way through jungles, slaying dragons, or even sharing apartments) Chloe and I had created something of a world together. — Alain De Botton

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed. — Alain De Botton

Memory is ... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection. — Alain De Botton

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. — Alain De Botton

We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us. — Alain De Botton

We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. — 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

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

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

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths. — Alain De Botton

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation. — Alain De Botton

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty. — Alain De Botton

But seriously, if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they'd probably say they didn't. Yet that's not necessarily what they truly think. It's just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don't until they're allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never get the chance. — Alain De Botton

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people. — Alain De Botton

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words. — 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

We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we've all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can't properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing and what sort of behaviour the person before us is rightfully owed. WE can be a little tricky to be around. — Alain De Botton

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way. — Alain De Botton

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

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

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that. — Alain De Botton

By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell, — Alain De Botton

And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think? — Alain De Botton

I believe that the sight is more important thing that the drawing; and i would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, that teach looking at nature that they may learn to draw. — Alain De Botton

We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained. — Alain De Botton

It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are. — Alain De Botton

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

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds. — 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

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

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like. — Alain De Botton

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

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too. — Alain De Botton

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one
that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life. — Alain De Botton

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

We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are. — Alain De Botton

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. — Alain De Botton

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other. — Alain De Botton

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe. — Alain De Botton

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough. — Alain De Botton

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

An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson. — Alain De Botton

Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasized that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons' threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers. — 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

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane. — Alain De Botton

Must being in love always mean being in pain? — Alain De Botton

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them. — Alain De Botton

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

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what book he could give the Soviets to teach them about the advantages of American society, he pointed to the Sears catalogue. — Alain De Botton

Differences of age or of race may set up postitions of manufactured superiority: the manual worker from Germany flies to Thailand and because of the historical advantage of his economy and exchange rate, feels and behaves like a millionaire. The plodding Englishman arrives in a small North American town and, simply on account of his exotic accent, may be welcomed as charmingly original and sophisticated. — Alain De Botton

Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate. — 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

When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us — Alain De Botton

We were bothered by sex because it is a fundamentally disruptive, overwhelming and demented force, strongly at odds with the majority of our ambitions and all but incapable of being discreetly integrated within civilized society. — Alain De Botton

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered — Alain De Botton

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft. — Alain De Botton

The news may encourage us to imagine that the roots of a nation's problems have their fundamental origins in criminality at the top and yet, though there is clearly a role for targeting individual rotten apples, there is an equally vital task in directing attention to the colourless yet far larger institutional failures that lie concealed within our political and social arrangements. — Alain De Botton

To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it. — Alain De Botton

Kvetching means complaining, and complaining is really what will forever keep New York the city it is. — Sari Botton

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us. — Alain De Botton

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less. — Alain De Botton

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out. — Alain De Botton

Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn't enough wrong with it - a crushing recognition when one considers Walter Benjamin's assessment of why people become writers: because they are unable to find a book already written that they are completely happy with. And — Alain De Botton