Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Any sadness I might have felt, any suspicion that happiness or understanding was unattainable, seemed to find ready encouragement in the sodden dark-red brick buildings and low skies tinged orange by the city’s streetlights.”

— Alain de Botton

254. “Beauty is a promise of happiness.”

— Alain de Botton

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

263. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

282. “Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

284. “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

285. “We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”

— Alain de Botton

286. “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

287. “An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.”

— Alain de Botton

288. “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

289. “There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership.”

— Alain de Botton

290. “How pleasant to hold in mind, through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere.”

— Alain de Botton

291. “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

292. “Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.”

— Alain de Botton

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

298. “Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

300. “We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.”

— Alain de Botton