Alain de botton quotes

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.

One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.

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

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

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.

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

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

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

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

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

Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.

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.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

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.

Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort's words, 'It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

Not everyone is worth listening to.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

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

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

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.

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

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.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

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

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

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

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

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

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

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

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.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

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.

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

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

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.

The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

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

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.