Quotes from Alain de Botton

the great fortunes of our day have rarely been accumulated through the sale of the most meaningful items and services, such as poetry or relationship counselling.

One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe could result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one's life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals?

It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it.

I lost the ability to consider the question of predestination with necessary scepticism.

He's not secretive, controlling, or withdrawn for malicious reasons; he just gives up on other people—and on his ability to persuade them of anything—with unhelpful ease.

A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate.

falsifications may occasionally need to be committed in the service of a goal higher still than accuracy:

What we search for in a work of architecture is not in the end so far from what we search for in a friend.

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

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

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

I remember going to university, and the people who'd left home for the first time looked at the food and were horrified. Whereas, my view was that if it was vaguely edible, then it's fine.

At 'The School of Life', we take seriously anything that has to do with human fulfilment - and take note wherever insight on this subject can be found.

It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.

What bothers me is that there is so much emphasis on food, rather than gathering and meeting - so that there is all this effort in creating the right food, whereas the food is only a small part of whether the encounter is successful or not.

I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.

I was an incredibly lonely, very alienated teenager.

Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'

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

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

As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.

Everyone's more vulnerable than they seem, and I think men are more vulnerable. Once you get close to a man, the whole thing's a facade anyway. I think manhood is fragile.

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.