Quotes by Alain de Botton

“Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the chi...”

“we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.”

“To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.”

“We would like to go and see the field that Milletshows us in his Springtime, we would like Claude Monet to take us to Giverny, on the banks of the Seine, to that bend of the river which he hardly l...”

“Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.”

“The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capit...”

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

“He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes...”

“He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for d...”

“Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.”

“Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.”

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

“The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.”

“It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or...”

“A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.”

“Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.”

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

“Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.”

“Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of ...”

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