The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division… — 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
The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation. — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our… — 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
Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go,… — Alain de Botton Copy Share Image
Parents become very good at not hearing the explicit words and listening instead to what the child means but doesn't yet know… — 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
It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, 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
