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Alain de Botton Quotes

All Quotes Achievement Age Ambition Anxiety Art Atheist Awareness Belief Bitterness Blame Challenges Children Choices Curiosity Desire Destiny Difficulty Dignity Envy Expectations Falling In Love Feelings Frustration Giving Giving Up God Gratitude Happiness Hate Heart Home Identity Inspiration Journey Joy Literature Losing Love Lying Memories Motivation Optimism Pain Painting Personality Perspective Philosophy Proust Purpose Quality Reality Sadness Soul Suffering Travel Understanding Weakness Worry Writing
The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

Alain de Botton
Smartphones, Interesting, Challenges
"The Radical Rethink of THINK Global School" by Breanna Reynolds, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 24, 2017.

There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39

Alain de Botton
Inspire, One Day, Swiftness

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
Pain, Thinking, Suffering
Alain De Botton (1997). “How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel”, Pantheon

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

Alain de Botton
People, Want, Better Life

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

Alain de Botton
Years, Lasts, Enough
Twitter post from Mar 04, 2015

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

Alain de Botton
Fighting, Balance, Work And Life
Twitter post from Oct 14, 2015

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

Alain de Botton
Inspiring, Maturity, Opinion
Twitter post from Jan 29, 2014

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

Alain de Botton
Looks, Way, Realising

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

Alain de Botton
Thinking, People, Normal
Twitter post from Sep 14, 2014

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

Alain de Botton
Reality, Years, Giving

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

Alain de Botton
Real, Weakness, May
Alain de Botton (2006). “On Love: A Novel”, p.134, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

Alain de Botton
Nice, Sunset, Daffodil

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

Alain de Botton
Relationship, Intimacy, Capacity
Twitter post from Oct 30, 2013

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
Love Is, Views, Names
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.6, Vintage

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

Alain de Botton
Good Relationship, Capacity
Twitter post from Mar 16, 2014

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

Alain de Botton
Suffering, Behaviour, Malice

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

Alain de Botton
Hate, Thinking, People
Twitter post from Sep 18, 2014

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Alain de Botton
Lying, Heart, Frustration
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, 2000.

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

Alain de Botton
Giving Up, Ambition, Journey
"What's A Kinder Way To Frame Success?". Interview with Guy Raz, www.npr.org. November 1, 2013.

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
Essence, Alive, Speak
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.60, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

Alain de Botton
May, Littles, Rich
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.43, Vintage

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

Alain de Botton
Despair, Events, Surrender

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

Alain de Botton
Thinking, Opposites, Anxiety
"Alain de Botton's Healing Arts" by Joshua Rothman, www.newyorker.com. November 19, 2013.

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

Alain de Botton
Writing, Simplicity, Belief

Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

Alain de Botton
Mind, Safe, Mental Health
Twitter post from Sep 20, 2015

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