Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: ‘just give us the money’.”

— Alain de Botton

402. “We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly and that we are invested enough to care.”

— Alain de Botton

403. “We are about to understand, but have not yet understood. This moment is important because it generally does not lie up to its promise. We abandon the process of reflection. Not much of a decision about the personal meaning of love, justice or success is achieved, and we move on to something else. Looking at Twombly’s painting assists us in a crucial thought: ‘The part of me that wonders about important questions and then gets confused has not had enough recognition.”

— Alain de Botton

404. “Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.”

— Alain de Botton

405. “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

406. “One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other – not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love...”

— Alain de Botton

407. “But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes; they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges.”

— Alain de Botton

408. “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

409. “A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.”

— Alain de Botton

410. “It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.”

— Alain de Botton

411. “We should forever forswear the masochistic process wherein we seek another’s approval before we have even asked ourselves whether that person’s views deserve to be listened to.”

— Alain de Botton

412. “In a world beset by fundamentalists of both believing and secular varieties, it must be possible to balance a rejection of religious faith with a selective reverence for religious rituals and concepts.”

— Alain de Botton

413. “Journeys are the midwives of thought.”

— Alain de Botton

414. “We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal.”

— Alain de Botton

415. “We should not be frightened by appearances.”

— Alain de Botton

416. “He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish.”

— Alain de Botton

417. “The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement.”

— Alain de Botton

418. “In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day’s work for a writer. You can’t put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.”

— Alain de Botton

419. “We too often act from scripts generated by the crises of long ago that we’ve all but consciously forgotten. We behave according to an archaic logic which now escapes us, following a meaning we can’t properly lay bare to those we depend on most. We may struggle to know which period of our lives we are really in, with whom we are truly dealing and what sort of behaviour the person before us is rightfully owed. WE can be a little tricky to be around.”

— Alain de Botton

420. “Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren’t exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there’s been a break – a day away, a busy period, an evening at work – for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted.”

— Alain de Botton

421. “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

422. “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

423. “We might do better, instead, to distance ourselves, both practically and emotionally, from those whom we consider to be our equals and yet who have grown richer than us.”

— Alain de Botton

424. “It was a symbol of what Ruskin had done for Proust, and what all books might do for their readers, namely bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.”

— Alain de Botton

425. “It is as if we need to be reminded of convention in order properly to appreciate the wonder of being unguarded...”

— Alain de Botton

426. “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

427. “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

428. “The twenty-four-hour diner, the station waiting room and the motel are sanctuaries for those who have, for noble reasons, failed to find a home in the ordinary world, sanctuaries for those whom Baudelaire might have dignified with the honorific ‘poets’.”

— Alain de Botton

429. “One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

— Alain de Botton

430. “Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn’t praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a little plant?”

— Alain de Botton

431. “My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.”

— Alain de Botton

432. “A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us.”

— Alain de Botton

433. “French travellers were prone to be very upset by the differences. In hotels, they kept away from sideboards with strange foods, requesting the normal dishes they knew from home. They tried not to talk to anyone who had made the error of not speaking their language, and picked gingerly at the fennel bread. Montaigne.”

— Alain de Botton

434. “Never, ever become a writer. It’s a nightmare.”

— Alain de Botton

435. “The issue of how to cede to seduction is tortuous: too soon and one may appear unworthy, too slow and one may lose the interest of the partner.”

— Alain de Botton

436. “For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence. The.”

— Alain de Botton

437. “Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others.”

— Alain de Botton

438. “It seems easier to respond to our enthusiasms by trading in facts than by investigating the more naive question of how and why we have been moved.”

— Alain de Botton

439. “To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. 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. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.”

— Alain de Botton

440. “Whereas we can say something sensible and polite to any stranger, it is only in the presence of the lover we wholeheartedly believe in that can we date to be extravagantly and boundlessly unreasonable.”

— Alain de Botton

441. “Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres’s portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning.”

— Alain de Botton

442. “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

443. “How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. ‘Thank God!’ we say,‘ those illusions are gone.’ Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.”

— Alain de Botton

444. “There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren’t good enough for us.”

— Alain de Botton

445. “The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it – just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.”

— Alain de Botton

446. “Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent NORMALITY of the loved one.”

— Alain de Botton

447. “A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.”

— Alain de Botton

448. “Being political doesn’t only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election; to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers.”

— Alain de Botton

449. “There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.”

— Alain de Botton

450. “Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.”

— Alain de Botton