Best 477 quotes of Alain De Botton on MyQuotes

According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

An understandable hunger for potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, immune to the methods of factory farming.

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

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

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

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

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.

Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

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

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.