We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me? — 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
![“It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/9a7/alain-de-botton-221_accepting_it-s-as-though-either-you-accept-religio_2768643.jpg)
