Quotes by Alain de Botton

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

“Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.”

“The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tenderness and realism. Its often imagined that itll be seductive to convey an air of adoration, to hin...”

“We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowe...”

“Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is...”

“To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.”

“Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, ...”

“Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity...”

“Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.”

“There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.”

“The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.”

“Yet in reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, th...”

“We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the ...”

“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 ...”

“We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”

“We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how ...”

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

“We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our signifi...”

“It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.”

“Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.”