Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair…

“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

“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.”

— Alain de Botton

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

“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.”

— Alain de Botton

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

“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

“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

I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful.

— Alain de Botton

“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.”

— Alain de Botton

“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

“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.”

— Alain de Botton

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

“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

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

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

— Alain de Botton