I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters. — 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
“One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.” — 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
“How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.” — 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
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
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me? — 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
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
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
The essential argument in the book, 'Art as Therapy,' is that art enjoys such financial and cultural prestige that it's easy to… — 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
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
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
“When Franklin D. Roosevelt was asked what book he could give the Soviets to teach them about the advantages of American society,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after… — 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
“Reading Proust nearly silenced Virginia Woolf. She loved his novel, but loved it rather too much. There wasn’t enough wrong with it—a… — 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
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
“...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
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
“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
“[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply… — 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
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
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.” — 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
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Books should be full of stuff you could never say to people in public.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk… — 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
“If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the number of Books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone… — 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
What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should… — 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
![“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/a9c/alain-de-botton-221_anxiety_l-ife-is-a-phenomenon-in-need-of-critici_1775630.jpg)
![“An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/579/alain-de-botton-221_anathema_an-understandable-hunger-for-potential-c_1056177.jpg)
![“[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/317/alain-de-botton-221_beauty_donald-keene-observed-in-a-book-entitled_2150315.jpg)
