“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
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to. — 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
What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I guess my overall life plan is to think about issues that concern me and try to use culture generally to make… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an… — 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
“We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It… — 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
In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through… — 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
“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of… — 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
“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
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
“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
“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
“...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at… — 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
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity… — 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
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough. — 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
“A feeling of beauty is a sign that we have come upon a material articulation of certain of our ideas of a… — 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 appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.” — 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
We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“How we feel about 'the nature of existence' is largely determined by what we have to do in the next few hours.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Despite their claims to a purely scientific and reasoned approach, the relationship of Modernist architects to their work remained at base a… — 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
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
“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
“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
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
“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
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
“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
“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
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share
“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
“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
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
“Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were… — Alain de Botton Copy Share
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves. — Alain de Botton Copy Share
![“He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspective. Why might this be interesting, or even inspiring? Perhaps because unhappiness can stem from only…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/b54/alain-de-botton-221_books_he-wordsworth-invited-his-readers-to-aba_616994.jpg)
![“[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error…” quote by Alain de Botton](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/a9c/alain-de-botton-221_anxiety_l-ife-is-a-phenomenon-in-need-of-critici_1775630.jpg)
