Might Quotes by Alain de Botton

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

— Alain de Botton

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are…

— Alain de Botton

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

— Alain de Botton

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

— Alain de Botton

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

— Alain de Botton

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise…

— Alain de Botton

I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.

— Alain de Botton

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

— Alain de Botton

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of…

— Alain de Botton

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

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might…

— Alain de Botton

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central…

— Alain de Botton

There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The…

— Alain de Botton

“Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on…

— Alain de Botton

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having…

— Alain de Botton

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

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike…

— Alain de Botton

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his…

— Alain de Botton

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is…

— Alain de Botton

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be…

— Alain de Botton