Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

210. “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

211. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

213. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

215. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

217. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

231. “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

232. “Neither does philosophy deny the utility of certain kinds of anxiety. After all, as successful insomniacs have long suggested, it may be the anxious who survive best in the world.”

— Alain de Botton

233. “The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.”

— Alain de Botton

234. “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

235. “Every fall into love is the triumph of hope over self-knowledge.”

— Alain de Botton

236. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

238. “Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.”

— Alain de Botton

239. “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

240. “It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad...”

— Alain de Botton

241. “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

242. “The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.”

— Alain de Botton

243. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

244. “The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.”

— Alain de Botton

245. “Let’s say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, ‘I’ve come here because I’m in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live,’ – they would show you the way to the insane asylum.”

— 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. “The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another’s fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.”

— Alain de Botton

248. “There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you’ll reach a moment where someone goes, ‘Oh, that’s a bit heavy,’ or ‘Eew, disgusting.’ And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.”

— Alain de Botton

249. “I know a lot about writing, but I don’t know much about how other industries work. I’ve tried to use my naivety to my advantage.”

— Alain de Botton

250. “The child teaches the adult something else about love: that genuine love should involve a constant attempt to interpret with maximal generosity what might be going on, at any time, beneath the surface of difficult and unappealing behavior.”

— Alain de Botton