Quotes by Alain de Botton

“Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brig...”

“The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.”

“It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achie...”

“The rich believe that their money will insulate them from setbacks and frustrations, and that's one of the absurdist expectations of all.”

“There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be a...”

“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?”

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

“If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and ...”

“As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”

“On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.”

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”

“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”

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

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

“There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them.”

“It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive th...”

“Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it”

“A great writer picks up on those things that matter. Its almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.”

“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.”