Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.”

— Alain de Botton

352. “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

353. “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

354. “Look not just at the Roman campagna, the pageantry of Venice, and the proud expression of Charles I astride his horse, but also have a look at the bowl on the sideboard, the dead fish in your kitchen, and the crusty bread loaves in the hall.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

356. “Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.”

— Alain de Botton

357. “If we were entirely sane, if madness did not have a serious grip on one side of us, other people’s tragedies would hold a great deal less interest for us.”

— Alain de Botton

358. “Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.”

— Alain de Botton

359. “People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.”

— Alain de Botton

360. “We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love. Eventually.”

— Alain de Botton

361. “Love reinvents our needs with unique speed. My impatience with the customs ritual indicated that Chloe, who I had not known existed a few hours ago, had already acquired the status of a craving. I felt I would die if I missed her outside – die for the sake of someone who had only entered my life at eleven thirty that morning.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

371. “Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.”

— Alain de Botton

372. “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

373. “It’s clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.”

— Alain de Botton

374. “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

375. “Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...”

— Alain de Botton

376. “A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one, a silence with an attractive one leaves you certain it is you who are impossibly dull.”

— Alain de Botton

377. “One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.”

— Alain de Botton

378. “Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation.”

— Alain de Botton

379. “Chamfort, echoing the misanthropic attitude of generations of philosophers before and after him, put the matter simply: ‘Public opinion is the worst of all opinions.”

— Alain de Botton

380. “Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.”

— Alain de Botton

381. “Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.”

— Alain de Botton

382. “I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.”

— Alain de Botton

383. “I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.”

— Alain de Botton

384. “What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly ‘whole’.”

— Alain de Botton

385. “Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.”

— Alain de Botton

386. “The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends.”

— Alain de Botton

387. “The motor of our ingenuity is the question ‘Does it have to be like this?’, from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books.”

— Alain de Botton

388. “The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology.”

— Alain de Botton

389. “The ease with which we can connect the psychological world with the outer, visual and sensory one seeds our language with metaphors.”

— Alain de Botton

390. “There are people who say, ‘Oh this guy is quite thick.’ I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don’t mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, ‘No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.’”

— Alain de Botton

391. “Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.”

— Alain de Botton

392. “Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.”

— Alain de Botton

393. “Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.”

— Alain de Botton

394. “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

395. “The Spanish had butchered the Indians with a clean conscience because they were confident that they knew what a normal human being was. Their reason told them it was someone who wore breeches, had one wife, didn’t eat spiders and slept in a bed.”

— Alain de Botton

396. “There would come a moment with every book when we would feel that something was incongruous, misunderstood, or constraining, and it would give us a responsibility to leave our guide behind and continue our thoughts alone.”

— Alain de Botton

397. “The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.”

— Alain de Botton

398. “If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.”

— Alain de Botton

399. “The most uncouth of our afflictions is to despise our being. Rather than trying to cut ourselves in two, we should cease waging civil war on our perplexing physical envelopes and learn to accept them as unalterable facts of our condition; neither so terrible, nor so humiliating.”

— Alain de Botton

400. “One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.”

— Alain de Botton