Quotes from Alain de Botton

Our vulnerability insults our self-conception; we are in pain and at the same time offended that we could so easily be so.

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

Sá»± th?t là khi chúng ta lá»›n lên, ta gi?t t?t c? nh?ng ng??i yêu thÆ°Æ¡ng ta b?ng m?i quan tâm ta dành cho h?, b?ng tình âu y?m ??y b?t an mà ta khÆ¡i g?i và không ng?ng khu?y Ä'á»™ng trong lòng h?. (Proust)

The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be glimpsed, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

this was only a confirmation of the uniqueness that I had managed to find in my girlfriend. I had animated her face with her soul.

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.

Doyurulmay? bekleyen gereksinimler kimi zaman halüsinasyonlar doÄŸurur: Susuzluk suyu hayal eder, aÅŸka duyulan gereksinim de ideal bir erkek ya da kad?n?.

The longing for company may be no less powerful or irresponsible in its effects than the sexual motive once was.

A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us.

a lack of love: between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.

It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those we are least attracted to.

We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time, perhaps even a lot of it – inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a light bulb.

The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology.

Certainly travelers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare colored butterfly, often sighted, but rarely conclusively identified.

We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells.

the only difference between the end of love and the end of life being that at least in the latter, we are granted 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 most certainly not the end of life.

The start of work means the end to freedom, but also to doubt, intensity and wayward desires.

Friends afford us a change to express our deepest selves, and that the conversations we have with them are a privileged forum in which to say what we really think and, by extension and with no mystical allusion, be who we really are.

If prostitutes ... attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain.

Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.

The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends

What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place.

Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to enquiries about how we're doing.

The truth, in so far as a human being is able to attain such a thing, lies in a statement which it seems impossible to disprove. It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.