Top 500 Alain de Botton Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “Our mortality does not call for panic, but for a sense of awe.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

404. “No one properly gets, or can fully sympathize with, anyone else.”

— Alain de Botton

405. “He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life – so he stayed, and did just that.”

— Alain de Botton

406. “It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.”

— Alain de Botton

407. “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

408. “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

409. “There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as ‘normal’, as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple – all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.”

— Alain de Botton

410. “Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can’t believe in any of it.”

— Alain de Botton

411. “At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves – that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.”

— Alain de Botton

412. “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

413. “Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.”

— Alain de Botton

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.”

— Alain de Botton

418. “Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you’ll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities – and we should take care.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

420. “His accent is kind of irresistible, she says. It makes him feel a little lonely to realise how easy it is to be liked by someone who has no idea who he is.”

— Alain de Botton

421. “I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.”

— Alain de Botton

422. “The values captured in art shouldn’t remain in the museum – they should go with us into the playroom.”

— Alain de Botton

423. “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

424. “Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: ‘just give us the money’.”

— Alain de Botton

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

432. “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

433. “Journeys are the midwives of thought.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

435. “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

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

— Alain de Botton

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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. “Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

444. “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

445. “Men often want to love, without managing to do so: they seek their own ruin without being able to attain it, and, if I can put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

447. “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

448. “There may be no better way to clear the diary of engagements than to wonder who among our acquaintances would make the trip to the hospital bed.”

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

450. “Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.”

— Alain de Botton