Alain de Botton

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

— Alain de Botton

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.

— Alain de Botton

Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.

— Alain de Botton

The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things that kinda need to be mentioned. But often the romantic view is to say, 'If you loved me, you wouldn't criticise me.' Actually, true love is often about trying to teach someone how to be the best version of themselves.

— Alain de Botton

Where is instruction in relationships, in the management of career, in the raising of children, in the pursuit of friendship, in the wise approach to anxiety and death? All this sort of stuff I craved to learn about when I was a student and down to this day.

— Alain de Botton

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

— Alain de Botton

The romantic person instinctively sees marriage in terms of emotions, but what a couple actually gets up to together over a lifetime has much more in common with the workings of a small business. They must draw up work rosters, clean, chauffeur, cook, fix, throw away, mind, hire, fire, reconcile, and budget.

— Alain de Botton

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

— Alain de Botton

I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful.

— Alain de Botton

Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?

— Alain de Botton

There's a constant tension between the excitement of new people and security with one person. If you go with excitement, you create chaos; you hurt people. There's jealousy, and it gets very messy. If you have security, it can be boring, and you die inside because of all the opportunities missed.

— Alain de Botton

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

— Alain de Botton

Life is near-death experience.

— Alain de Botton

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

— Alain de Botton

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

It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

— Alain de Botton

The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is that we find lovely in them - the visions of friendship, togetherness, repose, or whatever. And then consider what would actually help us find these qualities in our lives.

— Alain de Botton

There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

— Alain de Botton

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

— Alain de Botton

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

— Alain de Botton

Not everyone is worth listening to.

— Alain de Botton

We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world.

— Alain de Botton

Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.

— Alain de Botton

Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

— Alain de Botton

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

— Alain de Botton

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

— Alain de Botton

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

— Alain de Botton

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

— Alain de Botton

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

— Alain de Botton

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

— Alain de Botton

In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

— Alain de Botton

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

— Alain de Botton

We should not be frightened by appearances.

— Alain de Botton

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

— Alain de Botton

Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?”

— Alain de Botton

Deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort’s words, “It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.”

— Alain de Botton

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices, telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown our the faint sounds emitted from our souls, and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

— Alain de Botton

The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although—to the more imaginative at least—a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.

— Alain de Botton

It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.

— Alain de Botton

Alcohol-inspired fights … are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.

— Alain de Botton

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.

— Alain de Botton

Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all to easily confused with clownishness.

— Alain de Botton

I … thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.

— Alain de Botton

Symons … remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited—long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms—what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.

— Alain de Botton

An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.

— Alain de Botton

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.

— Alain de Botton

The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left … having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

— Alain de Botton

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

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

— Alain de Botton

Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department.

— Alain de Botton

Year-end financial statements … express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable—yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating—than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.

— Alain de Botton

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, … and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

— Alain de Botton

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

— Alain de Botton

It appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity—suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

— Alain de Botton

[These entrepreneurs] were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, … but by a lack of custom.

— Alain de Botton

For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.

— Alain de Botton

The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.

— Alain de Botton

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

— Alain de Botton

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

— Alain de Botton