Quotes from Alain de Botton

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they'd probably say they didn't. Yet that's not necessarily what they truly think. It's just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don't until they're allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.

The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste, but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and grace.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.