The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how… — 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
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. — 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
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
Among adults, we can admit that of course, characters are creations. They aren't real people. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The central task for a business is to make a profit. The challenge is to make a profit by doing things which… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English… — 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
Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors,… — 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
