I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The moral? That life can be a stranger substance than a cliche life, that goldfinches should occasionally do things differently from their… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Beneath the pleasure generated by the juxtaposition of order and complexity, we can identify the subsidiary architectural virtue of balance. Beauty is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a threefold plea, that we cease investing with moral connotations something as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“While paying attention to the messages in its public spaces, Christianity also wisely recognizes the extent to which our concepts of good… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of… — 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
