Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British philosopher and author. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy’s relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love, which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life, Status Anxiety and The Architecture of Happiness. He co-founded The School of Life in 2008 (the YouTube channel has nearly 5million subscribers) and Living Architecture in 2009. In 2015, he was awarded ‘The Fellowship of Schopenhauer’, an annual writers’ award from the Melbourne Writers Festival, for this work. May these Alain de Botton Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.” Alain de Botton
2. “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.” Alain de Botton
3. “We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?” Alain de Botton
4. “Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won’t find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.” Alain de Botton
5. “You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.” Alain de Botton
6. “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.” Alain de Botton
7. “It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.” Alain de Botton
8. “To one’s enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.” Alain de Botton
9. “Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.” Alain de Botton
10. “The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.” Alain de Botton
11. “People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages, to be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.” Alain de Botton
12. “What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” Alain de Botton
13. “It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.” Alain de Botton
14. “At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves – that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.” Alain de Botton
15. “A good half of the art of living is resilience.” Alain de Botton
16. “It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.” Alain de Botton
17. “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.” Alain de Botton
18. “Laughter is an important part of a good relationship.” Alain de Botton
19. “Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.” Alain de Botton
20. “Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.” Alain de Botton
21. “I think of myself as quite a shy person. But when I’m curious about something, I’ll go quite far to satisfy my curiosity.” Alain de Botton
22. “Deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort’s words, ‘It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man that he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.” Alain de Botton
23. “Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.” Alain de Botton
24. “The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.” Alain de Botton
25. “Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.” Alain de Botton
26. “The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.” Alain de Botton
27. “It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially molded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others. Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion’s questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.” Alain de Botton
29. “The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.” Alain de Botton
30. “There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.” Alain de Botton
31. “Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.” Alain de Botton
32. “Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.” Alain de Botton
33. “True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.” Alain de Botton
34. “If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colors and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.” Alain de Botton
35. “Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.” Alain de Botton
36. “Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.” Alain de Botton
37. “There is something at once sobering and absurd in the extent to which we are lifted by the attentions of others and sunk by their disregard.” Alain de Botton
38. “What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.” Alain de Botton
39. “As we write, so we build; to keep a record of what matters to us.” Alain de Botton
40. “We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.“ Alain de Botton
41. “Just be yourself – is about the worst advice you can give some people.” Alain de Botton
42. “In ‘Art as Therapy’, we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.” Alain de Botton
43. “We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.” Alain de Botton
44. “The only way to be happy is to realize how much depends on how you look at things.” Alain de Botton
45. “Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.” Alain de Botton
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