Quotes from Alain de Botton

We admire New York precisely because the traffic and crowds have been coerced into a difficult but fruitful alliance.

It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned prom periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were.

The nature of this particular daydream is foreign, unfamiliar and frankly not a little disgusting to me, but I'm interested in hearing about it nonetheless, because more critical than my relative comfort is my ability to cope with who you are.

What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.

By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject.

I will love you not just for your wit and talent and beauty, but simply because you are you, with no strings attached. I love you for who you are deep in your soul, not for the colour of your eyes or the length of your legs or the size of your cheque book.

Her mother always said one should never go to bed on an argument.

They haven't just had sex; they have translated their feelings – appreciation, tenderness, gratitude and surrender – into a physical act.

The moral? That life can be a stranger substance than cliché life, that goldfinches should occasionally do things differently from their parents, and that there are persuasive reasons for calling a loved one Plouplou, Missou, or poor little wolf.

In another paradox that des Esseintes would have appreciated, it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.

I kiss, therefore I do not think.

Quanto mais difícil é a nossa vida, mais podemos nos comover à imagem graciosa de uma flor. As lágrimas - se elas vêm - são uma reação não à tristeza, e sim à graciosidade da imagem. Não que precisemos nos preocupar. Pelo menos pelos próximos séculos, teremos problemas suficientes para saber que não há o menor risco de as imagens graciosas deixarem de nos comover.

One could compare a lover's gaze to a barbecue skewer. Within the complexity of our nature, every lover pics up on certain elements and neglects others.

enojo poco después de recibir una ofensa es la cosa más generosa que uno puede hacer, pues le ahorra al ofensor el florecimiento de la culpa y la necesidad de hacer bajar al ofendido de su torre almenada. Como

It is difficult to get the news from poems

We end up believing that our struggles are indications of having made some unusual and fundamental error, rather than evidence that our marriages are essentially going entirely according to plan.

Marriage, to Rabih, feels like the high point of a daring path to total intimacy; proposing has all the passionate allure of shutting one's eyes and jumping off a steep cliff, wishing and trusting that the other will be there to catch one.

which even Bash?, at the peak of his powers, would have struggled to describe as convincingly as the menu's scribe: Warm grilled chicken slices, Smoked bacon, crisp lettuce, And a warm ciabatta roll on a bed of sea-salted fries

The news may encourage us to imagine that the roots of a nation's problems have their fundamental origins in criminality at the top and yet, though there is clearly a role for targeting individual rotten apples, there is an equally vital task in directing attention to the colourless yet far larger institutional failures that lie concealed within our political and social arrangements.

Rabih's love is a logical response to the discovery of complementary strengths and a range of attributes to which he aspires. He loves from a feeling of incompleteness - and from a desire to be made whole. He isn't alone in this. Albeit in different areas, Kirsten is likewise seeking to make up for deficiencies.

The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order — and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface.

Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals..

she knows, better than most, that there is no one more likely to destroy us than the person we marry.

We can achieve a balanced view of adult love not by remembering what it felt like to be loved as a child but rather by imagining what it took for our parents to love us - namely, a great deal of work.