Alain De Botton

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.

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

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.

We have to put aside the customary historical reading of works of art in order to invite art to respond to certain quite specific pains and dilemmas of our psyches.

I do think that travel can be part of a journey of inner maturation, but you've got to do it right.

Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.

I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

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.

The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

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

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.