When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of… — 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
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity. — 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
It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity -… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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
Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our… — 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
