“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole... — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for… — 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
