Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making itself apparent: I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island. It.”

— Alain de Botton

202. “As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.”

— Alain de Botton

203. “Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love; its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner’s way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these junctures. It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love’s collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.”

— Alain de Botton

204. “We seem divided between an urge to override our senses and numb ourselves to our settings and a contradictory impulse to acknowledge the extent to which our identities are indelibly connected to, and will shift along with, our locations.”

— Alain de Botton

205. “We do our sulking lovers the greatest possible favor when we are able to regard their tantrums as we would those of an infant. We are so alive to the idea that it’s patronizing to be thought of as younger than we are; we forget that it is also, at times, the greatest privilege for someone to look beyond our adult self in order to engage with – and forgive – the disappointed, furious, inarticulate child within.”

— Alain de Botton

206. “Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole...”

— Alain de Botton

207. “Being alone spares you from constant reminders of how difficult and strange you are. No one is there to hold a mirror up – record your antics and constantly make you accountable for them. If you’re lucky, you will be able to tolerate and even like yourself.”

— Alain de Botton

208. “It seemed an advantage to be travelling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by whom we are with, we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.”

— Alain de Botton

209. “It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

211. “The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things.”

— Alain de Botton

212. “The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.”

— Alain de Botton

213. “When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief.”

— Alain de Botton

214. “If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”

— Alain de Botton

215. “The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.”

— Alain de Botton

216. “Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”

— Alain de Botton

217. “On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.”

— Alain de Botton

218. “But is shame really the most useful tool to be employed in the reformation of mankind? Do people grow better through being belittled? Does fear educate?”

— Alain de Botton

219. “Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with and forgives us for what they see underpins our whole capacity to trust and to give. Love is a dividend of gratitude for our lover’s insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.”

— Alain de Botton

220. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

221. “A clean conscience is the preserve of those without sufficient imagination.”

— Alain de Botton

222. “Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

224. “Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other.”

— Alain de Botton

225. “A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. “Beauty is the promise of happiness,” he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe’s face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention.”

— Alain de Botton

226. “There are two ways to make a man richer, reasoned Rousseau: give him more money or curb his desires.”

— Alain de Botton

227. “When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.”

— Alain de Botton

228. “It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.”

— Alain de Botton

229. “There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way that Manet approached asparagus.”

— Alain de Botton

230. “For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit.”

— Alain de Botton

231. “Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant.”

— Alain de Botton

232. “Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.”

— Alain de Botton

233. “We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities... And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance... we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.”

— Alain de Botton

234. “You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.”

— Alain de Botton

235. “The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.”

— Alain de Botton

236. “Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.”

— Alain de Botton

237. “Maturity’ really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.”

— Alain de Botton

238. “The business of repatriating emotions emerges as one of the most delicate and necessary tasks of love. To accept the risks of transference is to prioritize sympathy and understanding over irritation and judgment. Two people can come to see that sudden bursts of anxiety or hostility may not always be directly caused by them, and so should not always be met with fury or wounded pride. Bristling and condemnation can give way to compassion. By.”

— Alain de Botton

239. “It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.”

— Alain de Botton

240. “A well-loved child is set a challenging precedent. In its very nature, parental love works to conceal the effort which went into generating it. It shields the recipient from the donor’s complexity and sadness – and from an awareness of how many other interests, friends and concerns the parent has sacrificed in the name of love.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

242. “There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.”

— Alain de Botton

243. “Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.”

— Alain de Botton

244. “We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.”

— Alain de Botton

245. “Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”

— Alain de Botton

246. “Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

248. “The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell.”

— Alain de Botton

249. “We are not always humiliated by failing at things, he suggested; we are humiliated only if we invest our pride and sense of worth in a given aspiration or achievement and then are disappointed in our pursuit of it.”

— Alain de Botton

250. “I will never be able to do or be everything you want, nor vice versa, but I’d like to think we can be the sort of people who will dare to tell each other who we really are. The alternative is silence and lies, which are the real enemies of love.”

— Alain de Botton