Top 15 Alain de Botton Quotes

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

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

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

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.

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

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

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

"To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

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.