The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Analogising architecture with ethics helps us to discern that there is unlikely ever to be a single source of beauty in a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer.” — alain de botton Copy Share Image
The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Lovers cannot remain philosophers for long, they should give way to the religious impulse, which is to believe and have faith, as… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“a lack of love: between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. "I began… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“religions merit our attention for their sheer conceptual ambition; for changing the world in a way that few secular institutions ever have.… — 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
