Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown… — 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
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There… — 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
