Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

53. “It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.”

— Alain de Botton

54. “Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.”

— Alain de Botton

55. “Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

57. “Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.”

— Alain de Botton

58. “Our ‘ego’ or self-conception could be pictured as a leaking balloon, forever requiring the helium of external love to remain inflated and vulnerable to the smallest pinpricks of neglect.”

— Alain de Botton

59. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

60. “Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

62. “Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

64. “Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.”

— Alain de Botton

65. “What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.”

— Alain de Botton

66. “When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.”

— Alain de Botton

67. “Most good thinking has its origin in fear.”

— Alain de Botton

68. “One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.”

— Alain de Botton

69. “So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.”

— Alain de Botton

70. “People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.”

— Alain de Botton

71. “Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

73. “Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they’re not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they’re for all of us.”

— Alain de Botton

74. “Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.”

— Alain de Botton

75. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

76. “To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.”

— Alain de Botton

77. “If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

79. “The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.”

— Alain de Botton

80. “The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.”

— Alain de Botton

81. “Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.”

— Alain de Botton

82. “There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”

— Alain de Botton

83. “We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”

— Alain de Botton

84. “The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where “ordinary” life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.”

— Alain de Botton

85. “With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.”

— Alain de Botton

86. “If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.”

— Alain de Botton

87. “We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.”

— Alain de Botton

88. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

89. “The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not – as we flatteringly think – how lazy they are, but how hard they work.”

— Alain de Botton

90. “Until one is close to death, it must be difficult to declare anyone as the love of one’s life.”

— Alain de Botton

91. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

92. “Not everyone is worth listening to.”

— Alain de Botton

93. “So, in what ways are you mad?”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

95. “It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”

— Alain de Botton

96. “Life gives us no such handy markers – a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.”

— Alain de Botton

97. “A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.”

— Alain de Botton

98. “Romanticism is a philosophy of intuitive agreement. In real love, there is no need tiresomely to articulate or spell things out. When two people belong together, there is simply – at long last – a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.”

— Alain de Botton

99. “To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”

— Alain de Botton

100. “We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt.”

— Alain de Botton