Alain de Botton

I am a very aesthetic person.

— Alain de Botton

“Beauty is a promise of happiness.”

— Alain de Botton

“Journeys are the midwives of thought.”

— Alain de Botton

Travel is a lot like love.

— Alain de Botton

I am always anxious.

— Alain de Botton

Not everyone is worth listening to.

— Alain de Botton

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

— Alain de Botton

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

— Alain de Botton

“The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.”

— Alain de Botton

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

— Alain de Botton

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

— Alain de Botton

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

— Alain de Botton

“Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.”

— Alain de Botton

“Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.”

— Alain de Botton

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

— Alain de Botton

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

— Alain de Botton

“When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”

— Alain de Botton

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity…

— Alain de Botton

“But reassurance can be the cruelest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst.”

— Alain de Botton

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

— Alain de Botton

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling…

— Alain de Botton

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the…

— Alain de Botton

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might…

— Alain de Botton

“An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer…

— Alain de Botton

“peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an…

— Alain de Botton

Where is instruction in relationships, in the management of career, in the raising of children, in the pursuit of friendship, in the…

— Alain de Botton

“The challenge facing atheists is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious…

— Alain de Botton

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so…

— Alain de Botton

“Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and…

— Alain de Botton

“Powerlessness became 'goodness', baseness 'humility', submission to people one hated 'obedience' and, in Nietzsche's phrase, "not-being-able to-take-revenge' turned into 'forgiveness'. Every feeling…

— Alain de Botton

“The longing provoked by the brochure was an example , at once touching and pathetic, of how projects (and even whole lives)…

— Alain de Botton

“If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is…

— Alain de Botton

“News organizations are coy about admitting that what they present us with each day are minuscule extracts of narratives whose true shape…

— Alain de Botton

“There is only one person to whom we can expose our catalogue of grievances, one person who can be the recipient of…

— Alain de Botton

“At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by…

— Alain de Botton

The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things…

— Alain de Botton

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

— Alain de Botton

A gray V-neck pullover from Gap. I have 30 of them.

— Alain de Botton