Quotes from Alain de Botton

The greatest compliment I get about my writing is when people say, 'How did you know so much about me?' And of course, the answer is very simple: 'I just observed myself without sentimentality.'

Many of our ideas of what love is comes from stories... these are extremely powerful shapers of our attitudes towards love, and I think that, in some ways, often we've got the wrong story.

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

I think of myself as quite a shy person. But when I'm curious about something, I'll go quite far to satisfy my curiosity.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

I do think that travel can be part of a journey of inner maturation, but you've got to do it right.

We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure subjects or who spend most of their day in libraries. But every human is, in an important sense, a carrier of an implicit philosophy - evident in their choices, pronouncements and commitments.

We don't sulk with everybody. We limit our sulks to a very particular person: the person who's supposed to love us and understand us. And we make this equation that if you love me, you're supposed to understand me even if I don't explain what's wrong.

You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it's the worst decision in your life. That's fine. That's not a sign your marriage has gone wrong. It's a sign that it's normal; it's on track. And many of the hopes that took you into the marriage will have to die in order for the marriage to continue.

Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty easy to live with; it's just a question of finding the right person,' massive alarm bell rings in my mind.

What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.

...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

Small issues are really just large ones that haven't been accorded the requisite attention.