“Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope. — 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
Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day- to- day take on things. The bare facts of life… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for… — alain de botton Copy Share Image
It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world… — 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
