Quotes from Alain de Botton

The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder.

The philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse its painlessness the title of "love").

I found myself wishing that the rest of mankind would follow the engineers' example and agree on a series of symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and often painful psychological states — a code which might help us feel less tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and silent exchanges of equations.

It follows that the balance we approve of in architecture, and which we anoint with the word 'beautiful', alludes to a state that, on a psychological level, we can describe as mental health or happiness.

Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election; to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers.

In light of all he understands about himself and the course of love, he can see that the kindest thing he can do to someone he truly likes is to get out of the way fast.

My eyes were bewildered at their freedom. Without the motives that had marked the rest of the day - to seek out the airport, the exit out of Marseilles and so on - they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random and impatient patterns

Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hating and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor being false to yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult.

I will despise whatever lies in the domain of Fortune, but if a choice is offered, I will choose the better half.

There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated.

Cele mai atr?g?toare femei nu sunt cele care ne dau voie s? le s?rut?m imediat (devenim repede nerecunosc?tori) ?i nici cele care nu ne las? deloc s? le s?rut?m (le uit?m repede), ci cele care ne duc de nas aceste extreme.

You ask whether the Orient is all I imagined it to be. Yes, it is—and more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it. I have found, clearly delineated, everything that was hazy in my mind.'   8.

If we read the new masterpiece of a man of genius, we are delighted to find in it those reflections of ours that we despised, joys and sorrows which we had repressed, a whole world of feeling we had scorned and whose value the book in which we discover them suddenly teaches us.

The challenge facing atheists is how to reverse the process of religious colonization: how to separate ideas and rituals from the religious institutions which have laid claim to them but don't truly own them.

The more closely we analyse what we consider 'sexy', the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence. The

It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.

Just as a childhood can be released from the odour of a washing powder or cup of tea, an entire culture can spring from the angles of a few lines.

Chi pronuncia parole d'amore è come chi lancia un messaggio in codice con una trasmittente difettosa, senza mai essere sicuro di cosa viene captato (e, ciò nonostante, come un dente di leone che libera infinite spore delle quali una minima parte si riproduce, quel fortuito, ottimistico tentativo di telecomunicazione va compiuto - fiducia nel servizio postale).

Religions understand this: they know that to sustain goodness one, it helps to have an audience. The faiths hence provide us with a gallery of witnesses at the ceremonial beginnings of our marriages and thereafter they entrust a vigilant role to their deities.

a supernatural instrument before whose miracle we used to stand amazed, and which we now employ without giving it a thought, to summon our tailor or to order an ice cream

For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of a majestic and substantial conclusion: that he or she may constitute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken questions of existence. The

Eroticism is therefore seemingly most clearly manifest at the intersection between the formal and the intimate.

considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence:

We place such demands on our partners, and become so unreasonable around them, because we have faith that someone who understands obscure parts of us, whose presence solves so many of our woes, must somehow also be able to fix everything about our lives. We exaggerate the other's powers in a curious sort of homage—heard in adult life decades down the line—to a small child's awe at their own parents' apparently miraculous capacities. To