Alain De Botton

The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is that we find lovely in them - the visions of friendship, togetherness, repose, or whatever. And then consider what would actually help us find these qualities in our lives.

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

Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

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.

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

That said, deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort's words, 'It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.

We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

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).

It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.

We tend to think of philosophies as produced by professional philosophers. Traditionally, this has meant people who have written dissertations on obscure subjects or who spend most of their day in libraries. But every human is, in an important sense, a carrier of an implicit philosophy - evident in their choices, pronouncements and commitments.