Top 496 Quotes & Sayings by Alain de Botton
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English writer Alain de Botton.
Last updated on November 4, 2024.
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.
It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, 'I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.'
Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.
My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
There's a constant tension between the excitement of new people and security with one person. If you go with excitement, you create chaos; you hurt people. There's jealousy, and it gets very messy. If you have security, it can be boring, and you die inside because of all the opportunities missed.
Advertising is - quite often - alive to our real needs. It's just the products on offer might not be the things that will help us satisfy them.
My father paid for my education; then he made it clear that I was on my own.
The essential argument in the book, 'Art as Therapy,' is that art enjoys such financial and cultural prestige that it's easy to forget the confusion that persists about what it's really for.
I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
Most of the time, we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us; therefore, we are not likely to be forgiving or sympathetic.
Travel is a lot like love.
The person who is truly best suited to us is not the person who shares our tastes, but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently and wisely.
I believe that art is a tool and that, like all tools, it has functions. I also think it is important to know what the tool is for so that we can better know how and when to use it.
Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses, and reawaken appreciation.
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
When a restaurant is too popular, it starts to harm the reason you are there.
The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.
I am a very aesthetic person.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address the question of what art is for. This is a question that has, quite unfairly, come to feel impatient, illegitimate, and a little impudent.
We don't sulk with everybody. We limit our sulks to a very particular person: the person who's supposed to love us and understand us. And we make this equation that if you love me, you're supposed to understand me even if I don't explain what's wrong.
Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Laughter is an important part of a good relationship. It's an immense achievement when you can move from your thinking that your partner is merely an idiot to thinking that they are that wonderfully complex thing called a loveable idiot. And often that means having a little bit of a sense of humour about their flaws.
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.
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition.
We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration.
I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.
My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins. The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves, and we're not joining that nonsense.
There's something called religion, and it was invented a long time ago by people who felt very out of control with their lives, who didn't know... why the sun always rose over the mountains.
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.
I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.
Parent and child may both love, but - unbeknown to the child - each party is on a different end of the axis. This is why, in adulthood, when we first long for 'love', what we mean is that we want to 'be loved' as we were once loved by a parent.
Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty easy to live with; it's just a question of finding the right person,' massive alarm bell rings in my mind.
The number one person who needs my books is me. I'm not some sort of disinterested guru who has worked life out and is handing things out to the poor people who might not have life worked out.
Parents don't reveal how often they have bitten their tongue, fought back the tears, or been too tired to take off their clothes after a day of childcare. The parent loves, but they do not expect the favour to be returned in any significant way.
It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
I like working with people. I believe change can only come through collaboration.
The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business. They must draw up work rosters, clean, chauffeur, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile, and budget.
You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it's the worst decision in your life. That's fine. That's not a sign your marriage has gone wrong. It's a sign that it's normal; it's on track. And many of the hopes that took you into the marriage will have to die in order for the marriage to continue.
Art can do the opposite of glamourise the unattainable: it can show us anew the genuine merit of life as we're forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need.
The central task for a business is to make a profit. The challenge is to make a profit by doing things which are genuinely good for people and good for societies.
Everyone's more vulnerable than they seem, and I think men are more vulnerable. Once you get close to a man, the whole thing's a facade anyway. I think manhood is fragile.
In 'Art as Therapy', we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.
I am not a foodie, thank goodness. I will eat pretty much anything. A lot of my friends are getting incredibly fussy about food and I see it as a bit of an affliction.
Love is something that we need to learn.
I think of myself as quite a shy person. But when I'm curious about something, I'll go quite far to satisfy my curiosity.
I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful.
The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.
As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to pay their way. It's like a monastery in a way, and that beautiful refuge has been destroyed by dogma about what this stuff is for.
Fantasies can be great, but we shouldn't make the wedding a fantasy, because the wedding is the gateway to married life. It shouldn't be a moment of illusion; it should be a moment of preparation.
Work is a way of bringing order to chaos, and there's a basic satisfaction in seeing that we are able to make something a little more coherent by the end of the day.
The death of marriage has been announced so often and would seem so normal, in a sense. So what's surprising is the sheer longevity and tenacity of this institution.
The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things that kinda need to be mentioned. But often the romantic view is to say, 'If you loved me, you wouldn't criticise me.' Actually, true love is often about trying to teach someone how to be the best version of themselves.
What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.
I think a certain degree of pessimism is actually helpful to love.
I keep a picture of my beloved children close by. Also, water and plenty of pads and pens.
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