“He is a collection of tissues and cells delicately and intricately conjoined and brought to life for only an instant. It will… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might only constitute a narrow and perhaps rather mean-minded aspect of emotional life, one principally focused… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Art can do the opposite of glamourise the unattainable: it can show us anew the genuine merit of life as we're forced… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To make it into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed… — 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
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally committed to an equally meaningless existence: Contemplate the restless industry of wretched little… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“I think the genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“In the past, we got to know others because we had no option but to ask them for help – and were… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life:… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Beauty, then, is a fragment of the divine, and the sight of it saddens us by evoking our sense of loss and… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The most significant fact of political life, which almost no news organization will dare to acknowledge – because it would at a… — 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
