Alain de Botton

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

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

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.

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other__ imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes _ hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways _ and that__ okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we__e all these incredibly fragile beings.

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

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.

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

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

When you feel sad, you are participating in a venerable experience, to which I, this monument, am dedicated. Your sense of loss and disappointment, of frustrated hopes and grief at your own inadequacy, elevate you to serious company. Do not ignore of throw away your grief

In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207)

One cannot read a novel without ascribing to the heroine the traits of the one we love.

It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble.

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 embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be.

The core _ and perhaps unexpected _ thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns _ and in this sense simplify.

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

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It__ almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

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