Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

253. “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

254. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

256. “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

257. “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

258. “It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

260. “Long before we’ve had a chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It can seem as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams.”

— Alain de Botton

261. “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

262. “The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.”

— Alain de Botton

263. “Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.”

— Alain de Botton

264. “I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.”

— Alain de Botton

265. “It isn’t surprising if, as adults, when we first start to form relationships, we should devotedly go off in search of someone who can give us the all-encompassing, selfless love that we may once have known in childhood. Nor would it be surprising if we were to feel frustrated and in the end extremely bitter at how difficult it seems to be to find; at how seldom people understand what we need or care to help us properly.”

— Alain de Botton

266. “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”

— Alain de Botton

267. “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

268. “We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.”

— Alain de Botton

269. “The wish to sleep with certain people can arise in us long before we have had the chance to get to know them properly – before, that is, we have had any opportunity to sit down and have a discussion with them about their history, interests and feelings.”

— Alain de Botton

270. “The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.”

— Alain de Botton

271. “Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.”

— Alain de Botton

272. “The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”

— Alain de Botton

273. “However disgruntled or puzzled a social hierarchy may leave us feeling, we are apt to go along with it on the resigned assumption that it is too entrenched and must be too well founded to be questioned. We are led to believe, in other words, that communities and the principles underpinning them are, practically speaking, immutable – even, somehow, natural.”

— Alain de Botton

274. “Beauty is a promise of happiness.”

— Alain de Botton

275. “Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.”

— Alain de Botton

276. “Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.”

— Alain de Botton

277. “The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.”

— Alain de Botton

278. “The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.”

— Alain de Botton

279. “Because I have this thing about birthdays – they always remind me of death and forced jollity.”

— Alain de Botton

280. “A thought provoking number of the world’s most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead.”

— Alain de Botton

281. “There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”

— Alain de Botton

282. “The success of any relationship should be determined, not just by how happy a couple are to be together, but by how worried each partner would be about not being in a relationship at all.”

— Alain de Botton

283. “To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song.”

— Alain de Botton

284. “There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.”

— Alain de Botton

285. “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

286. “The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.”

— Alain de Botton

287. “We can see beauty well enough just by opening our eyes, but how long this beauty will survive in memory depends on how intentionally we have apprehended it.”

— Alain de Botton

288. “As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.”

— Alain de Botton

289. “Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of “the wretchedness of man’s situation,” and poured scorn on “all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.”

— Alain de Botton

290. “We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”

— Alain de Botton

291. “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

292. “The fear of forgetting anything precious can trigger in us the wish to raise a structure, like a paperweight to hold down our memories.”

— Alain de Botton

293. “Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.”

— Alain de Botton

294. “There is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. 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

295. “I’m also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage – which no previous society has ever believed.”

— Alain de Botton

296. “My dear friend, I may be dense,’ replied Humblot after having taken a brief and clearly bewildering glance at the opening of the novel, ’but I fail to see why a chap needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.”

— Alain de Botton

297. “Melancholy isn’t always a disorder that needs to be cured. It can be a species of intelligent grief which arises when we come face-to-face with the certainty that disappointment is written into the script from the start.”

— Alain de Botton

298. “There is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.”

— Alain de Botton

299. “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 ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.”

— Alain de Botton

300. “The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.”

— Alain de Botton