Alain de Botton Quotes: 18

• 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.

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

• One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

• The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

• Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

• The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

• There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

• Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

  The Consolations of Philosophy

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

• Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

• Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

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

• It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.

  Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

• 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.

• 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.

  Status Anxiety

• The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

  Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

• Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

  Status Anxiety

• We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...