Books Quotes by Alain de Botton
All Books quotes Alain de Botton’s page
Alain de Botton suggests a good book can feel like a trusted friend, arriving just when we need it. He notes that our reading preferences are as fixed as our taste in food, and that literature lets us experience many emotions quickly. He also points out that self‑help titles often miss the sense of life's incompleteness.
![“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/i/579/alain-de-botton-221_anathema_an-understandable-hunger-for-potential-c_1056177.jpg)
![“He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/b54/alain-de-botton-221_books_he-wordsworth-invited-his-readers-to-aba_616994.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/i/317/alain-de-botton-221_beauty_donald-keene-observed-in-a-book-entitled_2150315.jpg)
![“[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/i/a9c/alain-de-botton-221_anxiety_l-ife-is-a-phenomenon-in-need-of-critici_1775630.jpg)
