Alain de Botton quotes

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”

“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”

“Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.”

“Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity.”

“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”

“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”

“Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”

“One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?”

“One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.”

“People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.”

“The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.”

“The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.”

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

“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.”

“You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.”