Alain de Botton Quotes

The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future — or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people.

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

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

..we 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.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.

Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don’t have to explain why we find a particular joke so funny; we have the same people; we both want to try that rather specialised sexual scenario.
It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers’ capacities for understanding, we mustn’t blame them for dereliction. They were not tragically inept. They couldn’t fully fathom who we were – and we could do no better. Which is normal. No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.

Books should be full of stuff you could never say to people in public.

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.