Asking someone to be with us turns out to be an impossibly demanding and therefore pretty mean thing to suggest to anyone… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did. — 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
