Alain de Botton Quotes

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

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

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

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.

The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

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.

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.

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

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

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

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

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