Alain de Botton

“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 s...”

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

“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of an...”

“...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned...”

“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in ch...”

“You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.”

“The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such...”

“Choosing a person to marry is hence just a matter of deciding exactly what kind of suffering we want to endure rather than of assuming we have found a way to skirt the rules of emotional exi...”

“The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.”

“Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it”

“It is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge.”

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

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

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

“I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as it seems only polite to do so. But at heart it's absurd; we should band tog...”

“What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.”

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

“It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a me...”

“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, '...”

“There is militaristic-hegemonic-plutocratic side of the U.S. which is getting out of hand and threatens to corrupt the whole republic. I remain a deeply concerned, committed admirer, but als...”