“...the truth of the maxim that beauty lies between the extremities of order and complexity.” — 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
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“I thought of the similarities of complaints--always selfishness, always blindness--and the old psychological truth that what we complain of in others, others… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
“Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or… — 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