Quotes from Alain de Botton

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

It seems as if, in making a marriage, either the individual or the interest of the species must come off badly.

One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other

To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about.

Why? Because no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment. Nietzsche

Because I have this thing about birthdays--they always remind me of death and forced jollity.

A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully ) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

Sexiness might at first appear to be a merely physiological phenomenon, the result of awakened hormones and stimulated nerve endings. But in truth it is not so much about sensations as it is about ideas—foremost among them the idea of acceptance and the promise of an end to loneliness and shame.

We are ready for relationships not when we have encountered perfection, but when we have grown willing to give flaws the charitable interpretations they deserve. This is because the success or failure of a relationship doesn't hinge on whether the other is deeply flawed – they are. What matters is how we interpret their failings; how we understand the reasons why they have previously been and will again in the future be very difficult to be with.

good things have banal ingredients.

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.

Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...

we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.

It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money.

Sunday evenings had long saddened me, reminders of death, unfinished business, guilt, and loss.

There is no such thing as a hurt that is too small to matter when emotional closeness is at stake.

And what excuse was there for this? Nothing but the old line that parents and politicians will use before taking out their scalpels: I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I have honoured you with a vision of how you should be, therefore I will hurt you.

It is when we find points of connection to the foreign that we are able to grow.

Hopper invites us to feel empathy with the woman in her isolation. She seems dignified and generous, only perhaps a little too trusting, a little naive—as if she has knocked against a hard corner of the world. Hopper puts us on her side, the side of the outsider against the insiders. The figures in Hopper's art are not opponents of home per se; it is simply that in a variety of undefined ways, home appears to have betrayed them, forcing them out into the night or onto the road.

Thunderstorms were what death, and dramatic events, generally should be like, but usually were not; the idea that our life's dramas rarely look as dramatic as they are. Our most cataclysmic moments are typically free of gravitas, of necessary thunder; a person dies, but instead of the sky darkening and lightning striking, the sun continues to shine and the birds to sing.