Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”

— Alain de Botton

Featured in: Quotes About Balance

2. “Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

Featured in: Resilience Quotes

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

— Alain de Botton

5. “Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”

— Alain de Botton

6. “The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.”

— Alain de Botton

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

9. “Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.”

— Alain de Botton

10. “The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

12. “Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.”

— Alain de Botton

13. “For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.”

— Alain de Botton

14. “We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.”

— Alain de Botton

15. “Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.”

— Alain de Botton

16. “We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.”

— Alain de Botton

17. “True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.”

— Alain de Botton

18. “Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”

— Alain de Botton

19. “What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.”

— Alain de Botton

20. “In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

Featured in: Reading Quotes

22. “Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.”

— Alain de Botton

23. “The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.”

— Alain de Botton

24. “When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

26. “The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”

— Alain de Botton

27. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

28. “Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”

— Alain de Botton

29. “Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

31. “Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.”

— Alain de Botton

32. “What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.”

— Alain de Botton

33. “People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

35. “I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

37. “Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.”

— Alain de Botton

Featured in: Fun Quotes

38. “Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.”

— Alain de Botton

39. “A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.”

— Alain de Botton

40. “One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.”

— Alain de Botton

41. “Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.”

— Alain de Botton

42. “We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

44. “Loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.”

— Alain de Botton

45. “The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.”

— Alain de Botton

46. “I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.”

— Alain de Botton

47. “What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.”

— Alain de Botton

48. “The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

50. “Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.”

— Alain de Botton