Quotes from Alain de Botton

An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to pay their way. It's like a monastery in a way, and that beautiful refuge has been destroyed by dogma about what this stuff is for.

When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.

Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.

Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.

I was told by my father nine times a day that you were going to get a job the minute you finish your studies.

We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

I am a very aesthetic person.

I am always anxious.

There's a constant tension between the excitement of new people and security with one person. If you go with excitement, you create chaos; you hurt people. There's jealousy, and it gets very messy. If you have security, it can be boring, and you die inside because of all the opportunities missed.

Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice.

The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things that kinda need to be mentioned. But often the romantic view is to say, 'If you loved me, you wouldn't criticise me.' Actually, true love is often about trying to teach someone how to be the best version of themselves.

Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good doing bad and it's nice to help someone.

I don't want to say that our expectations of love are too high; it's just that if we're to meet them, we have to become a little more self-aware.

Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.