Alain De Botton

We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.