Quotes from Alain de Botton

Patron Saint of Failures St Birgitta of Sweden.

Our weak understanding of our needs is aggravated by what Epicurus termed 'idle opinions' of those around us, which do not reflect the natural hierarchy of our needs, emphasizing luxury and riches, seldom friendship, freedom and thought. The prevalence of idle opinion is no coincidence. It is in the interest of commercial enterprises to slew the hierarchy of our needs, to promote a material vision of good and downplay an unsaleable one.

It is surprising to find that Proust held some extremely caustic views about friendship- in fact, to find that he had an unusually limited conception of the value of his, or indeed anyone's friendships.

A woman whom we need and who makes us suffer elicits from us a whole gamut of feelings far more profound and more vital than does a man of genius who interests us.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another—which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

We usually believe gossip about ourselves to have been inspired by a level of malice far greater (or more critical) than the malice we ourselves felt in relation to the last person we gossiped about, a person whose habits we could mock without this in any way altering our affection for them.

Life is cheerful, that's the devil's talk.

She retreats to a sad but oddly comforting and familiar place inside her head where she hides when others let her down (as they tend to do) and takes comfort in books and music. She is an expert in self-protection and defence; she has been in training for much of her life.

what Ruskin judged to be the twin purposes of art: to make sense of pain and to fathom the sources of beauty.

At this last stop before the road enters the endless forest, what we have in common with others can loom larger than what separates us.

A momentus but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.

It is a quirk of the age that the easiest way to start a friendship with someone is generally by asking them to get undressed.

I took my hands from my pockets and ran them along the bricks' gnarled and pitted surface. They seemed light and ready to crumble. I felt the impulse to kiss them, so as to experience more closely a texture that reminded me of blocks of pumice or halva from a Lebanese delicatessen.

Proust was not well place to enjoy honest friendships. For a start, he had far too many true but unkind thoughts about people.

It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soulmate. We needn't have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn't come into it. What matters instead is intuition: a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more

I did not live Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise

An architect intent on being different may in the end prove as troubling as an over-imaginative pilot or doctor.

A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

I thought of the similarities of complaints--always selfishness, always blindness--and the old psychological truth that what we complain of in others, others will complain of in us.

Precedent forces us to suppose that later generations will one day walk around our houses with the same attitude of horror and amusement with which we now consider many of the possessions of the dead. They will marvel at our wallpapers and our sofas and laugh at aesthetic crimes to which we are impervious. This awareness can lend to our affections a fragile, nervous quality.

feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.

What we complain of in others, others will complain of in us.

To make [reading] into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.