Alain de Botton Quotes

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent.

About Author

Alain de Botton (; born 20 December 1969) is a Swiss-born British author and public speaker. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004), and The Architecture of Happiness (2006).
He co-founded The School of Life in 2008 and Living Architecture in 2009. In 2015, he was awarded "The Fellowship of Schopenhauer", an annual writers' award from the Melbourne Writers Festival, for that work.

Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details h...

There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our em...

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

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

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

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

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

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo....

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

After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [...

Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...

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

Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1)...

Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations h...

Maturity' really means: being very unsurprised by, and calm around, pain and disappointment.

Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with.

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to...

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