The person who is truly best suited to us is not the person who shares our tastes, but the person who can… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Asking someone to be with us turns out to be an impossibly demanding and therefore pretty mean thing to suggest to anyone… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Art can do the opposite of glamourise the unattainable: it can show us anew the genuine merit of life as we're forced… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
In 'Art as Therapy', we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We don't sulk with everybody. We limit our sulks to a very particular person: the person who's supposed to love us and… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do. — 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
“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
