Quotes from Alain de Botton

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.

It's profoundly counter-intuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good – to ourselves. It's everyone else who is out of step… And yet maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don't allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.

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.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

We may be powerless to alter certain events, but we remain free to choose our attitude towards them, and it is in our spontaneous acceptance of necessity that we find our distinctive freedom.

T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.