What we typically call love is only the start of love. Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its… — 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
“How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.” — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.” — 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
“No one has ever learned anything under conditions of humiliation. The moment you said anything humiliating, the lesson is over. They are… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“The word “snobbery” came into use for the first time in England during the 1820s. It was said to have derived from… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I guess my overall life plan is to think about issues that concern me and try to use culture generally to make… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is… — 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
It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces… — 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 study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Most of the time, we have to be strong, we must not show our fragility. We’ve known that since the schoolyard. There… — Alain De Botton Copy Share Image
“It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A danger of travel is that we may see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Most of the time, we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us;… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“They've reached the point where, by rights, their story -- always slight -- should draw to a close. The Romantic challenge is… — 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
