Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to…

“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