(Alain De Botton) Quotes

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.