Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.”

— Alain de Botton

452. “The issue of how to cede to seduction is tortuous: too soon and one may appear unworthy, too slow and one may lose the interest of the partner.”

— Alain de Botton

453. “Every year, humanity produces some 30,000 films, 2 million books and 100,000 albums, and 95 million people visit a museum or art gallery.”

— Alain de Botton

454. “Men often want to love, without managing to do so: they seek their own ruin without being able to attain it, and, if I can put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free.”

— Alain de Botton

455. “The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

457. “Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres’s portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.”

— Alain de Botton

458. “How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say,‘ those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.”

— Alain de Botton

459. “French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne.”

— Alain de Botton

460. “Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn’t praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?”

— Alain de Botton

461. “It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.”

— Alain de Botton

462. “It is when we find points of connection to the foreign that we are able to grow.”

— Alain de Botton

463. “For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence. The.”

— Alain de Botton

464. “It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.”

— Alain de Botton

465. “My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.”

— Alain de Botton

466. “To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.”

— Alain de Botton

467. “Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society’s expectations.”

— Alain de Botton

468. “It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were.”

— Alain de Botton

469. “Friends afford us a change to express our deepest selves, and that the conversations we have with them are a privileged forum in which to say what we really think and, by extension and with no mystical allusion, be who we really are.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

471. “Even if our loved ones have assured us that they’ll be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special.”

— Alain de Botton

472. “We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells.”

— Alain de Botton

473. “Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.”

— Alain de Botton

474. “If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardur and paradoxes – than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival.”

— Alain de Botton

475. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

476. “Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?”

— Alain de Botton

477. “Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.”

— Alain de Botton

478. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

479. “I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.”

— Alain de Botton

480. “It is the capacity to tolerate difference that is the true marker of the right person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.”

— Alain de Botton

481. “I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.”

— Alain de Botton

482. “Alice loved in order to make up for her own insufficiencies, she searched in others for qualities she aspired to, respected but lacked. Her emotional needs were like a puzzle incomplete without a segment brought by another but the dimensions of the void altered in response to self-development, the piece which fitted at fifteen would no longer fit at thirty. The gap redrew its contours, and unless the puzzle-person kept up she would be left to divorce or awkwardly force the issue.”

— Alain de Botton

483. “Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities.”

— Alain de Botton

484. “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 shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes – hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. Rabih.”

— Alain de Botton

485. “It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others... Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion’s questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.”

— Alain de Botton

486. “The challenge facing atheists is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don’t truly own them.”

— Alain de Botton

487. “Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate.”

— Alain de Botton

488. “I was to look around me as though I had never been in this place before. And slowly, my travels began to bear fruit.”

— Alain de Botton

489. “I was relying on youth be loyal to the specific variety of compromise and unhappiness, which our hard-won marriage represents.”

— Alain de Botton

490. “We need panels of gold and lapis, windows of coloured glass and gardens of immaculately raked gravel in order to stay true to the sincerest parts of ourselves.”

— Alain de Botton

491. “It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.”

— Alain de Botton

492. “A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.”

— Alain de Botton

493. “There is no such thing as a hurt that is too small to matter when emotional closeness is at stake.”

— Alain de Botton

494. “The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed – but survivable.”

— Alain de Botton

495. “When we suspect that we are appropriate targets for hurt, it does not take much for us to believe that someone or something is out to hurt us.”

— Alain de Botton

496. “What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves.”

— Alain de Botton

497. “The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface.”

— Alain de Botton

498. “Our designs go wrong because our feelings of contentment are woven from fine and unexpected filaments.”

— Alain de Botton

499. “With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.”

— Alain de Botton

500. “In light of all he understands about himself and the course of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to get out of the way fast.”

— Alain de Botton