Quotes from Alain de Botton

Romantic fatalism was no doubt a myth and an illusion, but that was no reason to dismiss it as nonsense. Myths may assume an importance that goes beyond their primary message, we don't have to believe in Greek gods in order to know that they tell us something vital about the mind of man.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

He will surmise that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions, and that, for his relationships to work, he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm.

If we refrain from questioning the status quo, it is – aside from the weather and the size of our cities – primarily because we associate what is popular with what is right. The

True beauty is indeed the one thing incapable of answering the expectations of an over-romantic imagination.…

It is the task of philosophy to let you down gently.

classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.

Children are always described from a third-person perspective ("Isn't Chloe a cute/ugly/intelligent/stupid kid?") before they gain the ability to influence their own definitions. Overcoming childhood could be understood as an attempt to correct the false stories of others. But the struggle against distortion continues beyond childhood.

To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

Efortul-o cale spre autenticitate ?i glorie.

the obstacle to our good development is not usually arrogance, but a lack of confidence.

Rabih is not marrying—and therefore fixing forever—a feeling. He is marrying a person with whom, under a very particular, privileged, and fugitive set of circumstances, he has been fortunate enough to have a feeling.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

Art compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body, weaknesses that we can refer to as psychological frailties

confinement. This morning the plane was over the Malay peninsula

The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.

What an achievement a moment of calm now is, what a minor miracle the ability to fall asleep or to talk undistracted with a friend – and what monastic discipline would be required to make us turn away from the maelstrom of news and listen for a day to nothing but the rain and our own thoughts.

Life is crueller than art, for the latter usually assures that physical surroundings reflect characters' mental states.

We are creature deeply marked by our expectations

The foregrounding of health may be one part of the mission of fashion, but on a more ambitious level, this art form also provides women with clothes that support a range of views about what it means to be an interesting and desirable human being.

He considered earthquakes and decided they were the result of air trapped inside the earth that had sought a way out, a form of geological flatulence.

Clashes of taste are an inevitable by-product of a world where forces continually fragment and deplete us in new ways.

Of course, there would be few great human achievements if we accepted all frustrations. The motor of our ingenuity is the question 'Does it have to be like this?', from which arise political reforms, scientific developments, improved relationships, better books.

Because we inhibit the same material world and manoeuvre with languages tied to common definitions, we talk to others in the assumption that they largely share our images and conceptions.