Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

304. “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

305. “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

306. “Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don’t. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. 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.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

311. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

313. “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

314. “The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

320. “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

321. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

331. “When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money.”

— Alain de Botton

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I have honoured you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you.”

— Alain de Botton

338. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

340. “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

341. “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

342. “Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

344. “We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture – and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

347. “My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a specific person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.”

— Alain de Botton

348. “It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.”

— Alain de Botton

349. “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

350. “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