Alain De Botton Quotes

There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.

It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.

A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

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

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it.

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

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

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

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.

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability.

My mistake was to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a specific person. It was the error of thinking that Chloe, rather than love, was inevitable.

The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.