Explore Quotes by Alain De Botton

We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.

Asking someone to be with us turns out to be an impossibly demanding and therefore pretty mean thing to suggest to anyone we would really want the best for.

One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.

Politicians want people to be nice neighbours, but the tools at their disposal are just the tools of modern liberal society, which are nothing.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the public's relationship to art has been weakened by a profound institutional reluctance to address the question of what art is for. This is a question that has, quite unfairly, come to feel impatient, illegitimate, and a little impudent.

Small issues are really just large ones that haven't been accorded the requisite attention.

It's great to get an 'F', but you also want to give the sense that there's something outside achievement. I've seen a lot of so-called high-achievers who don't feel they've achieved much.

I'm one of those introverted people who simply feels a lot better after spending time alone thinking through ideas and emotions. This is a sign, I've come to think, of a kind of emotional disturbance - a reaction to inner fragility. I wish I were more able to just act and do, rather than constantly have to retreat and examine and think.

I don't want to say that our expectations of love are too high; it's just that if we're to meet them, we have to become a little more self-aware.

Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty easy to live with; it's just a question of finding the right person,' massive alarm bell rings in my mind.

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

There's something called religion, and it was invented a long time ago by people who felt very out of control with their lives, who didn't know... why the sun always rose over the mountains.

Art can do the opposite of glamourise the unattainable: it can show us anew the genuine merit of life as we're forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need.

Many people in the intellectual elite are very scared of shouting. They insist on very quiet murmurs.

The essential argument in the book, 'Art as Therapy,' is that art enjoys such financial and cultural prestige that it's easy to forget the confusion that persists about what it's really for.

Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very clear function: it was meant to direct us towards the good and wean us off vice.

The modern world thinks of art as very important: something close to the meaning of life.

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.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.

Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'

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.