Alain de Botton Quotes

150 Sourced Quotes

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

Alain de Botton
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
One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

Alain de Botton
If the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

Alain de Botton
Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

Alain de Botton
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole...

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

Alain de Botton
One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

Alain de Botton
We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

Alain de Botton
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

Alain de Botton
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.

Alain de Botton
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

Alain de Botton
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.

Alain de Botton
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Alain de Botton
The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

Alain de Botton
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
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

Alain de Botton
As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

Alain de Botton
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Alain de Botton
The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones...If...we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

Alain de Botton
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
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Alain de Botton
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.

Alain de Botton
What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

Alain de Botton
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
As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

Alain de Botton
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
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

Alain de Botton
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

Alain de Botton
Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

Alain de Botton