Quotes from Alain de Botton

There is dangerous innocence in the expectation of a future formed on the basis of probability.

That fish taken out of the water several continents away could in a matter of hours be here in a warehouse in Northamptonshire is evidence of nothing short of logistical genius, based on a complex interplay of technology, managerial discipline and legal and economic standardisation.

Setting people examination papers measuring wisdom rather than learning would probably result in an immediate realignment of the hierarchy of intelligence – and a surprising new élite. Montaigne delighted in the prospect of the incongruous people who would now be recognized as cleverer than the lauded but often unworthy traditional candidates.

Rather than militantly pursue both truth and affection, they discern the incompatibilities, and so divide their projects, making a wise separation between the chrysanthemums and the novel, between Laure Haymann and the Odette de Crecy, between the letter which gets sent and the one that stays hidden but nevertheless needs to be written.

Doubt is easy when it is not a matter of survival: we are as skeptical as we can afford to be, and it is easiest to be skeptical about things that do not fundamentally sustain us. It is easy to doubt the existence of a table; it is hell to doubt the legitimacy of love.

If the fall into love happened so rapidly, is it perhaps because the wish to love has preceded the beloved? The need invented the solution. The appearance of the beloved is only the second stage of a prior but largely unconscious need to love someone.

If the search for happiness is the underlying quest of our lives, it seems only natural that it should simultaneously be the essential theme to which beauty alludes.

He asks her to marry him because it feels like an extremely dangerous thing to do: if the marriage were to fail, it would ruin both their lives.

Chardin had shown him that the kind of environment in which he lived could, for a fraction of the cost, have many of the charms he had previously associated with palaces and the princely life.

The whole language of love had been corrupted by overuse.

Being married may be associated with caution, conservatism and timidity, but getting married is an altogether different, more reckless and therefore more appealingly Romantic proposition.

Few things are as antithetical to sex as thought. Sex is instinctive, unreflexive and spontaneous, while thought is careful, uninvolved, and judgemental. To think during sex is to violate a fundamental law of intercourse.

Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

Instead of urging us to place the same value on all things, Proust might more interestingly have been encouraging us to ascribe them their correct value, and hence to revise certain notions of the good life, which risked inspiring an unfair neglect of some settings and a misguided enthusiasm for others.

The success of any relationship should be determined not just by how happy a couple are to be together, but by how worried each partner would be about not being in a relationship at all.

quienes se burlan de la amistad [...] bien pueden ser los mejores amigos del mundo», quizá porque quienes lo hacen abordan ese vínculo con expectativas más realistas que el resto.

nuestra forma de hablar está, en definitiva, vinculada a nuestra forma de sentir, ya que la manera en que describimos el mundo tiene que reflejar a ciertos niveles cómo lo experimentamos.

Taking trauma to be a primary route to growth and depth, Rabih wants his own sadness to find an echo in his partner's character.

We could define maturity as the ability to give everyone what they deserve when they deserve it, to separate the emotions that belong to, and should be restricted to, oneself from those that should at once be expressed to their initiators, rather than passed on to later and more innocent arrivals. We were often not mature.

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate. EVER AFTER

it would be more accurate to describe the Madeleine as provoking a moment of appreciation rather than mere recollection. Why don't we appreciate things more widely... inattention or laziness... it may also stem from insufficient exposure to images of beauty, which are close enough to our own world ignorer to guide and inspire us.

In the Proustian scheme, it is impossible to love someone physically.

Good relationships, elegant cities, work that is honourable and emotionally satisfying, as well as financially rewarding, are the true works of art, to which the objects we call art are only pointers and partial guides.

A genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.