Alain De Botton Quotes
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.