Quotes from Alain de Botton

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be. It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should.

We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake for us, an effort which no one can spare us.

In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends, it is because we genuinely want to.

He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.

their loyalty to each other deepened by their ever-increasing disloyalty towards everyone else.

There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled, or as "normal" as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for. At

Sex will never be simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be,It is not fundamentally democratic or kind; it is bound up with cruelty, transgression and the desire for subjugation and humiliation. It refuses to sit neatly on top of love, as it should.

for happiness and unhappiness are sisters and even twins that either grow up together or, as in your case, remain small together.

We seem incapable of looking at buildings or pieces of furniture without tying them to the historical and personal circumstances of our viewing; as a result, architectural and decorative styles become, for us, emotional souvenirs of the moments and settings in which we came across them.

Despite our best efforts to clean it of its peculiarities, sex will never be either simple or nice in the ways we might like it to be.

The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons.

Beauty is the promise of happiness.

Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. I began to question everything, she told me, I had to figure out what death was, that's enough to turn anyone into a philosopher. Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them.

How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young or slender. 'Thank God!' we say,' those illusions are gone.' Everything added to the self is a burden as well as a pride.

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.

There is no necessary connection between the concepts of home and of prettiness; what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to.

Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love; its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner's way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these junctures. It is as if the end of love is already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love's collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.

Yet we promise not to look around, either, for we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species.

what all books might do for their readers—namely, bring back to life, from the deadness caused by habit and inattention, valuable yet neglected aspects of experience.

Ideally, art would give us the answers that other people don't. This might even be one of the main points of literature: to tell us what society at large is too prudish to explore. The important books should be those that leave us wondering, with relief and gratitude, how the author could possibly have known so much about our lives.

Ce pericole produc acei b?rbaÈ›i înduio??tor de nesiguri care, necunoscându-È™i propria for?? de atracÈ›ie, au nevoie s? afle mereu dac? sunt acceptabili pentru alte persoane!

We appreciate beauty more when we are aware of life's troubles. — 8. Henri Fantin-Latour, Chrysanthemums, 1871

Saint Augustine consolingly codified unhappiness as an immutable feature of existence, part of the wretchedness of man's situation, and poured scorn on all those theories by which men have tried hard to build up joy for themselves within the misery of this life.

The issue of how to cede to seduction is tortuous: too soon and one may appear unworthy, too slow and one may lose the interest of the partner.