Quotes from Alain de Botton

Loneliness is a tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind.

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

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.

The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated—I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . .

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.

To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.

Nothing is erotic that isn't also, with the wrong person, revolting, which is precisely what makes erotic moments so intense: at the precise juncture where disgust could be at its height, we find only welcome and permission.

When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief

Q: Did he think that love could last forever? A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn't lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around.

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

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'.

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

Seeing through people is so easy, and it gets you nowhere,' remarked Elias Canetti, suggesting how effortlessly and yet how uselessly we can find fault with others.

Sex gets us out of the house and out of ourselves.

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

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.

It is surely significant that the adults who feature in children's books are rarely, if ever, Regional Sales Managers or Building Services Engineers.

We learn, too, that being another's servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.

A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate. Rabih

We can claim to have begun to know someone only when they have substantially disappointed us.

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.

The motor of our ingenuity is the question 'Does it have to be like this?', from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books.