Alain De Botton

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

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

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?

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.

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.