“we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“For the dueller, what other people think of him will be the only factor in settling what he may think of himself.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“...a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It seemed impossible, from within love at least, that this could have been anything but fate. It would have taken a steady… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The overreactor is responsible, as the psychological term puts it, for the 'transference' of an emotion from the past on to someone… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
