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Alain de Botton Quotes

Total quotes: 92
“To be a child of snobs deserves its own taxonomy, treatment and pathway to health. Part of this involves overcoming anger towards one’s carers – and realising that snobs are not evil, merely wounded.”
— Alain de Botton, The Children of Snobs
Tagged: How To Think, Empathy, Toxic Parents
“ By understanding and analyzing our feelings, we learn to see how emotions impact on our behavior in unexpected, counterintuitive and sometimes dangerous ways. Philosophers were the first therapists.”
— Alain de Botton, The School of Life: An Interview With Alain de Botton
Tagged: How To Think, The Person You'll Become, philosophers are therapists, philosophers are real therapists, Therapy Quotes, Change, Self-Esteem, Understanding
“You could perhaps say ‘happiness’ but ‘happiness’ is misleading, for it suggests continuous chirpiness and joy, whereas ‘fulfillment’ seems compatible with a lot of pain and suffering, which every decent life must by necessity have.”
— Alain de Botton, The School of Life: An Interview With Alain de Botton
Tagged: Philosophy, How To Think, Spirituality, Wisdom, Fulfillment, Happiness, Illusions, Truth
“To cope with the conflict between hope and reality, our culture should teach us good integration skills, prompting us to accept with a little more grace what is imperfect in ourselves – and then, by extension, in others. We should be gently reminded that no one we can love will ever satisfy us completely – but that this is never a reason to hate them either. We should move away from the naivety and cruelty of splitting people into the camps of the awful and the wondrous, to the mature wisdom of integrating them into the large collective of the ‘good enough’.”
— Alain de Botton, On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
Tagged: How To Think, The Human Mind, Psychology, Philosophy
“It’s a huge psychological achievement to accept other humans in their bewildering mixture of good and bad, capacity to assist us and to frustrate us, kindness and meanness – and to see that, far more than we’re inclined to imagine in our furious or ecstatic moments, most people belong in that slightly sobering, slightly hopeful grey area that goes by the term ‘good enough.'”
— Alain de Botton, On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
Tagged: How To Think, Psychology, Philosophy
“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 their cynicism if they could. The majority just never get the chance.”
— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
Tagged: Love, Reluctant, Mind And Heart, Truth About Love, Hesitance, Pretentions
“At the end of a relationship, it is the one who is not in love that makes the tender speeches.”
— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
Tagged: Love, Love Advice, Fate, Lessons In Love
“Code: People should be less cynical about love.Message: Give up your cynicism for me.”
— Alain de Botton, On Love
Tagged: On Love, Relationship, Trust, Love
“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”
— Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Tagged: Question, Religion, Faith, Belief, Truth Is Not What Matters
“We don’t exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness”
— Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
Tagged: Existence, Meaning, Understanding, Identity, Individuality, Friendship, Care
“In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.”
— Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
Tagged: Art, Religion, Devotion
“Yet we can perhaps only ever fall in love without knowing quite who we have fallen in love with. The initial convulsion is necessarily founded on ignorance.”
— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
Tagged: Fallin in Love, Love, Relationship, Ignorance
“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.”
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Tagged: Pain, beauty, Value
“Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.”
— Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
Tagged: Reason, Misfortunes
“The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Tagged: Unhappiness, Solitude
“In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.”
— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
Tagged: Marriage, Love, Unconditional Love
“Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.”
— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
Tagged: Love, disease, Suffering, Happiness
“The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Mind, Thinking, Answers, Subconscious, Brain
“Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.”
— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
Tagged: Love, Unrequited Love, Pain
“To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.”
— Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
Tagged: Love, Presence, Care
“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.”
— Alain de Botton, On Love
Tagged: Attraction, Love, kiss
“It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.”
— Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
Tagged: Problems, Appreciation, Law OF Attraction, beauty
“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.”
— Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life
Tagged: Learning, Problem, Pain, Failure, Suffering, Thinking
“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.”
— Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
Tagged: Love, Happiness
“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Tagged: Journey, travel, destination, Mindset, The Journey Is The Destination
“Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.”
— Alain de Botton, On Love: A Novel
Tagged: Human Existence, Appreciated, To Be Loved By Someone
“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”
— Alain de Botton, Alain de Botton on Twitter
Tagged: Relatable, book, novel, Reader
“You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.”
— Alain de Botton, Successful Parenting
Tagged: Comfortability, Relationships, differences, Love
“Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.”
— Alain de Botton, Twitter
Tagged: Childhood, Childhood Memories, Memories, senses, Nostalgia
“At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.”
— Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy
Tagged: Frustration, unyielding, Life, Reality, self, Wish, perseverance, Inspirational
“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you?”
— Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
Tagged: Love
“People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.”
— Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
Tagged: Cages, Metaphor
“It's as important to know how to give up on dreams/ambitions as it is to know how to generate them.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Dreams, ambitions
“One of the most astonishing human traits: our ability to keeping getting up, lugging ourselves around and doing our stuff day after day.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Human Traits, What Makes You Special
“One of the great recipes for a certain kind of happiness: a marked reluctance to imagine other people might deeply dislike you.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Happiness, Imagination
“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: book, Good Book, Reading
“Of many books, one feels, 'it could have been truly good, if the author's appetite for suffering had been greater.'”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Books, Authors, Writing
“Writing a book is like telling a joke and having to wait 2 years to know whether or not it was funny.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Writing, Books
“Writing fills a gap: the best books are largely the work of people who couldn’t find anyone in the vicinity they could talk to.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Writing, Books
“One of the touching illusions of being single for a while can be the impression that we are probably quite easy to live with.”
— Alain de Botton
Tagged: Being Single
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