“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The number one person who needs my books is me. I'm not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We had often read the same books at night in the same bed, and later realized that they had touched us in… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life;… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I always feel that I am writing for somebody who is bright but impatient. Someone who doesn't have unlimited time. That is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Heartache may be bad for the soul, but it's great for bookshops. It's when we are at our lowest romantic ebb that… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel. — 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 Image
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Image
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
