Quotes from Alain de Botton

We can be laughed into silence for attempting to speak in praise of phenomena which we lack the right words to describe. We may censor ourselves before others have the chance to do so. We may not even notice that we have extinguished our own curiosity, just as we may forget we had something to say until we find someone who is willing to hear it.

We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal

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.

Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.

How we feel about 'the nature of existence' is largely determined by what we have to do in the next few hours.

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous.

At the end of seven hundred and twelve pages of this manuscript,' he had reported, 'after innumerable griefs at being drowned in unfathomable developments and irritating impatience at never being able to rise to the surface – one doesn't have a single, but not a single clue of what this is about. What is the point of all this? What does it all mean? Where is it all leading? Impossible to know anything about it!

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.

At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident. We can start to break free from this torture by recognizing that the evenings that don't work out are really just a minor species of bad luck. The

Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

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

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

Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted that the comforting thought that we will not feel anything after death. No such comfort for the lover, who knows that the end of the relationship will not necessarily be the end of love, and almost certainly no the end of life.

Deprivation quickly drives us into a process of appreciation.

And what lies unknown within us includes such surprising things as ships that go through towns, seas that are momentarily indistinguishable from skies, fantasies that our beloved family will die in a major conflagration, and intense feelings of love sparked by contact with smooth skin.

A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.

What dangers are posed by those touchingly insecure men who, unsure of their own powers of attraction, need to keep finding out whether they are acceptable to others.

Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance. Love or simple obsession?

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.

It is not the contented or the glowing who have left many of the profound testimonies of what it means to be alive. It seems that such knowledge has usually been the privileged preserve of, and the only blessing granted to, the violently miserable.

You can tell a paragraph is slipping out of control when there's a runaway use of the word 'hence.

An important first step in overcoming defensiveness around art is to become more open about the strangeness that we feel in certain contexts.

We should add: it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk; it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.