Quotes by Alain de Botton

“[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominat...”

“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.”

“But the answer isn't just to intimidate people into consuming more 'serious' news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly e...”

“Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.”

“The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.”

“Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.”

“Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.”

“He [Wordsworth] invited his readers to abandon their usual perspective and to consider for a time how the world might look through other eyes, to shuttle between the human and the natural perspecti...”

“Being put in our place by something larger, older, greater than ourselves is not a humiliation; it should be accepted as a relief from our insanely hopeful ambitions for our lives.”

“It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must ha...”

“It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to...”

“We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained.”

“The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process...”

“what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves ha...”

“In our more arrogant moments, the sin of prideor superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulationtakes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we s...”

“If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people's tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.”

“At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.”

“Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period...”

“Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.”

“The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets.”