Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “To be mature is, we’re told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.”

— Alain de Botton

302. “If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.”

— Alain de Botton

303. “Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.”

— Alain de Botton

304. “The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.”

— Alain de Botton

305. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

307. “The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons”.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

309. “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

310. “Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.”

— Alain de Botton

311. “We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.”

— Alain de Botton

312. “The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment... Held up against certain ideals of success, his life has been a deep disappointment. But he can also see that it is, in the end, no great achievement simply to fixate on the failure. There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.”

— Alain de Botton

313. “We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they’re doing it.”

— Alain de Botton

314. “Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.”

— Alain de Botton

315. “If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.”

— Alain de Botton

316. “At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don’t work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The.”

— Alain de Botton

317. “Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.”

— Alain de Botton

318. “It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soulmate. We needn’t have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn’t come into it. What matters instead is intuition: a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason.”

— Alain de Botton

319. “In the end, I’ve found that it doesn’t really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won’t like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there’s always the chance you’ll end up thinking they’re all right.”

— Alain de Botton

320. “We must live with our enemies as if they might one day become our friends, and live with our friends as if they might some time or other become our enemies’.”

— Alain de Botton

321. “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

322. “Among the thin birch trees and simple flowers on the rough land of the Pentland Hills is set a tablet, like an ancient tomb stone, on the base of which has been carved the resonant Latin phrase et in arcadia ego. The words are the voice of the tomb: I, death, am here, in the midst of life.”

— Alain de Botton

323. “We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration. He.”

— Alain de Botton

324. “Wat hield deze liefdespermanentie in? Een zeker geloof in de liefde van de ander, dat zonder onmiddellijk bewijs of teken van de belangstelling van de geliefde in stand kon blijven, het geloof dat de partner, hoewel voor het weekend in Milaan of Wenen, niet bezig was een cappuccino of Sachertorte te nuttigen met een liefdesrivaal, het geloof dat een stilte gewoon een stilte was en niet een aanwijzing dat de liefde ter ziele was.”

— Alain de Botton

325. “In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way.”

— Alain de Botton

326. “I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.”

— Alain de Botton

327. “Cynics are merely idealists with unusually high standards.”

— Alain de Botton

328. “Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naive – as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. The figures in Hopper’s art are not opponents of home per se; it is simply that in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or onto the road.”

— Alain de Botton

329. “How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships – if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. Esther’s.”

— Alain de Botton

330. “The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.”

— Alain de Botton

331. “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

332. “Art builds up self-knowledge, and is an excellent way of communicating the resulting fruit to other people.”

— Alain de Botton

333. “Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.”

— Alain de Botton

334. “There is valour in being able to identify a forgiving, hopeful perspective on one’s life, in knowing how to be a friend to oneself, because one has a responsibility to others to endure.”

— Alain de Botton

335. “The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.”

— Alain de Botton

336. “We aren’t overwhelmed by anger whenever we are frustrated; only when we first believed ourselves entitled to a particular satisfaction and then did not receive it.”

— Alain de Botton

337. “It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.”

— Alain de Botton

338. “By overwhelming consensus, our culture locates the primary difficulty of relationships in finding the ‘right’ person rather than in knowing how to love a real – that is, a necessarily rather unright – human being.”

— Alain de Botton

339. “Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.”

— Alain de Botton

340. “The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn’t deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future – or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.”

— Alain de Botton

341. “The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives. But.”

— Alain de Botton

342. “In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.”

— Alain de Botton

343. “The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.”

— Alain de Botton

344. “We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time – inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb.”

— Alain de Botton

345. “Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.”

— Alain de Botton

346. “True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.”

— Alain de Botton

347. “What we colloquially call ‘feeling bored’ is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.”

— Alain de Botton

348. “What dangers are posed by those touchingly insecure men who, unsure of their own powers of attraction, need to keep finding out whether they are acceptable to others.”

— Alain de Botton

349. “It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.”

— Alain de Botton

350. “We wanted to test each other’s capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.”

— Alain de Botton