Alain De Botton

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

I tell my children what I think myself: That religion is not necessarily convincing, but it is still interesting and not to be laughed at or denigrated.

Parent and child may both love, but - unbeknown to the child - each party is on a different end of the axis. This is why, in adulthood, when we first long for 'love', what we mean is that we want to 'be loved' as we were once loved by a parent.

My father paid for my education; then he made it clear that I was on my own.

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

Katie Price is no exception. She, too, is - in a distinctive way - a philosopher. Partially, Katie Price's philosophy is one of extraordinary confidence. She is remarkable not for her looks or antics but because of her tremendous self-assurance and her unwillingness to be intimidated by criticism or failure.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

It's almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, 'I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.'

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

.. 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 all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.

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

My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

The idea that one might use art for 'instrumental' reasons tends to set off alarm bells at the heart of the cultural elite, who contend that it's not a pill, that it shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to 'cheer you up' or to 'make you a more empathetic person.'

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

The philosophy I love is very selective. It is really just the bit that is involved in a search for wisdom, and this means a short roll call of names; Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epicurus, Montaigne, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche.

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.

In 'Art as Therapy', we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.