Quotes by Alain de Botton

“I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.”

“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.”

“The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy itjust as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.”

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

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

“Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we...”

“A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deep...”

“It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the gr...”

“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 most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”

“Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly cons...”

“We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.”

“We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two area...”

“What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn an...”

“One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.”

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

“I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural conte...”

“What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any ...”

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

“Everyone is extremely hard and troubled to be around. Everyone has something substantially wrong with them. Everyoneisextremely hardto live with.”