Quotes from Alain de Botton

His clumsiness is at least an incidental sign of his sincerity: we tend not to get very anxious when seducing people we don't much care about.

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 almost certainly not the end of life.

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.

Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far).

The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray.

What enables him to think of himself as sane is only a certain fragile chemical good fortune, but he knows he would be very much in the market for a tragedy if ever life chose to test him properly.

a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment... because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time.

Human beings sometimes interest me but I don't like them because they are not intelligent enough.

There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way that Manet approached asparagus.

To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song.

Ancak ac?yla tan???nca gözümüzde deÄŸer kazan?r güzel ÅŸeyler. Belki biraz garip ama ac?yla tan???kl?k, mimariyi takdir edebilme yetisinin ön koÅŸuludur. Binalar?n güzelliÄŸinden etkilenebilmek için her ÅŸeyden önce biraz ac? çekmiÅŸ olmam?z gerekir.

We should give chaos pride of place once a year or so, designating occasions on which we can be briefly exempted from the two greatest pressures of secular adult life: having to be rational and having to be faithful.

An atheist may, of course, also feel clean after taking a bath and dirty without one, but the mikveh ritual, associating outer hygiene with the recovery of a particular kind of inner purity, like so many other symbolic practices promoted by religions, manages to use a physical activity to support a spiritual lesson.

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.

one cannot blame a lover for loving or not loving, for it is a matter beyond their choice and hence responsibility – though what makes rejection in love harder to bear than donkeys who can never sing is that one did once see the lover loving.

A thought provoking number of the world's most intelligent people have disdained any interest in decoration and design, equating contentment with discarnate and invisible matters instead.

If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.

I suffer, therefore I am special. I am not understood, but for precisely that reason, I am worthy of greater understanding. 13.

Epicurus observed that: Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren't exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there's been a break -- a day away, a busy period, an evening at work -- for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted.

Every skillful writer foregrounds notable aspects of experience, details that might otherwise be lost in the mass of data that continuously bathes our senses - and in so doing prompts us to find and savour those in the world around us.

Vân?m oameni cu care viaÈ›a e mai palpitant?, iar asta nu doar din convingerea c? ne aÈ™teapt? o existen?? mai armonioas?, ci din sentimentul inconÈ™tient c? tiparele frust?rii unui asemenea om ni se vor p?rea reconfortant mai familiare.

Wat hield deze liefdespermanentie in? Een zeker geloof in de liefde van de ander, dat zonder onmiddellijk bewijs of teken van de belangstelling van de geliefde in stand kon blijven, het geloof dat de partner, hoewel voor het weekend in Milaan of Wenen, niet bezig was een cappuccino of Sachertorte te nuttigen met een liefdesrivaal, het geloof dat een stilte gewoon een stilte was en niet een aanwijzing dat de liefde ter ziele was.

Când doi oameni sunt meniÈ›i s? tr?iasc? împreun?, exist? - pur È™i simplu - în cele din urm? - un sentiment în?l??tor È™i reciproc, în temeiul c?ruia ambele p?rÈ›i v?d lumea exact la fel.