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
“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
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
“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
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
“Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don't. This might even be one of the main points of literature:… — 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
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
“...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
“Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must… — 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
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
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
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
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
“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
“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
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“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
“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
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
“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 Copy Share
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 Copy Share
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
