Alain de Botton

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

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

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
- Alain de Botton

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

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
- Alain de Botton

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

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
- Alain de Botton

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
- Alain de Botton

Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
- 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.
- Alain de Botton

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

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
- Alain de Botton

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
- Alain de Botton

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
- Alain de Botton

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
- Alain de Botton

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
- Alain de Botton

Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
- Alain de Botton

The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives, and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness.
- Alain de Botton

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
- Alain de Botton

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
- Alain de Botton

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