Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice. — 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
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Thus was born an astonishing new idea that governments justify their existence only by promoting possibilities for prosperity and happiness among all… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The longing provoked by the brochure was an example , at once touching and pathetic, of how projects (and even whole lives)… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“What if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must also… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent. — 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
