Quotes from Alain de Botton

A work of tragedy would rise to its true moral and edifying possibilities when the audience looked upon the hero's ghastly errors and crimes and was left with no option but to reach the terrifying conclusion: 'How easily I, too, might have done the same.

In conversations, my priority was to be liked, rather than to speak the truth. A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play.

fabrication de la petite madeleine de Marcel Proust». Un paquete de ocho

Watching crowds step off the escalators and onto the concourse, I thought it miraculous that in the midst of so many people, I should ever be able to find her--as well as testimony to the strange particularities of desire that it should be precisely she whom I needed to find.

According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one.

In roadside diners and late-night cafeterias, hotel lobbies and station cafés, we may dilute our feeling of isolation in a lonely public place and hence rediscover a distinctive sense of community.

É impossível continuar a fazer amor se a carpete for sempre a mesma.

We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble.

Marriage: a deeply peculiar and ultimately unkind thing to inflict on anyone one claims to care for.

It's more than mere coyness to refer to what they have done as "making love." They haven't just had sex; they have translated their feelings—appreciation, tenderness, gratitude, and surrender—into a physical act.

Melancholy isn't always a disorder that needs to be cured.

Vai entender que o amor só dura quando não somos fiéis às suas sedutoras ambições iniciais e que, para ter um relacionamento duradouro, precisará abrir mão dos sentimentos que desde o início o levaram a amar. Precisará aprender que o amor é mais habilidade do que entusiasmo.

There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise.

A person cannot be at once a libertine and a married Romantic, however compelling both paradigms might be.

The news had, for Flaubert, armed stupidity and given authority to fools.

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

My insistence on leaving so early is in the end a symptom of fear. In a world of randomness and surprises, it's a technique I've developed to ward off anxiety and an unholy, unnameable sense of dread. I want to be on time the same way others lust for power and from a similar drive for security; it makes a little sense, though only a little, in light of the fact that I spent my childhood waiting for a father who never showed up. It's my own crazy way of trying to stay sane.

Web traffic figures for the BBC news website:

We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course.

Socrates The philosopher offered us a way out of two powerful delusions: that we should always or never listen to the dictates of public opinion. To follow his example, we will best be rewarded if we strive instead to listen to the dictates of reason

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

No one has ever learned anything under conditions of humiliation. The moment you said anything humiliating, the lesson is over. They are not on your side and they are offended. As We know it from feedback forms, it has got to be 99% sweetness and light and honey and 1% criticism, then you've got a potential chance to educate.

Although we belong to a species which spends an alarming amount of its time blowing things up, every now and then we are moved to add gargoyles or garlands, stars or wreaths, to our buildings for no practical reason whatever.

The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don't yet know very well. The best cure for love is to get to know them better.