Quotes from Alain de Botton

Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us.

So this is what it is to be a failure. The chief characteristic may be silence: the phone doesn't ring, he isn't asked out, nothing new happens. For most of his adult life he has conceived of failure in the form of a spectacular catastrophe, only to recognize at last that it has in fact crept up on him imperceptibly through cowardly inaction.

He (Proust) tells us, for instance, that there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, painlessly via a teacher or painfully via life, and he proposes that the painful variety is far superior... 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.

There is no doubt that a person's charms are less frequently a cause of love than a remark such as: "No, this evening I shan't be free.

The forthrightness of the middle-aged seducer is rarely a matter of confidence or arrogance; it is instead a species of impatient despair born of a pitiful awareness of the ever-increasing proximity of death.

Cynicism is too easy, and it gets you nowhere.

If, as Proust suggests, we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

His impression of her freedom and autonomy scares as much as it excites him.

Desire had turned me into a relentless hunter for clues, a romantic paranoiac, reading meaning into everything.

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.

Am putea eventual defini maturitatea - È›elul nostru perpetuu evaziv - ca abilitatea de a da fiec?ruia ceea ce merit? atunci când o merit?, de a separa emoÈ›iile care trebuie imediat exprimate fa?? de cei care le iniÈ›iaz?, în loc de a fi îndreptate mai târziu c?tre nevinovaÈ›i.

imaginative possession

prayer is when night descends over thought

n'allez pas trop vite.

there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.

Using a single word to describe two different things suggests a disregard for the world's real diversity which bears comparison with that shown by the cliché user.

We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers.

Compatibility is an achievement of love, it shouldn't be the precondition of love.

Rabih feels ready for marriage because he has despaired of being fully understood.

Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

bir iliÅŸkinin baÅŸar?s?n? s?rf çiftin beraber ne kadar mutlu olduÄŸuna bakarak deÄŸil, her bir partnerin bir iliÅŸkide olmama fikrini ne kadar dert ettiÄŸini de göz önünde bulundurarak deÄŸerlendirmek gerekir.

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered

The only way to defend language is to attack it....' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

The Prestige of Laundry