Alain de Botton

You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

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.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

We pick our friends not only because they are kind and enjoyable company, but also, perhaps more importantly, because they understand us for who we think we are.

Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.

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

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

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

Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced.

we would not reliably assent to reproduce unless we first had lost our minds.

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

...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 loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.

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

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 childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent__ warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes.How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right__n the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable__iven that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.

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

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

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.

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