I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
“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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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 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
