Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

309. “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

310. “Uno de los principales inconvenientes del amor, al menos durante un tiempo, es que corre el riesgo de hacernos felices.”

— Alain de Botton

311. “We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.”

— Alain de Botton

312. “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

313. “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

314. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

316. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

322. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

325. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

334. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

336. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

338. “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

339. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

342. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

344. “One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.”

— 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 freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons”.”

— Alain de Botton

347. “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

348. “The constant calls of the screens, some accompanied by the impatient pulsing of a cursor, suggest with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name.”

— Alain de Botton

349. “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

350. “Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.”

— Alain de Botton