Quotes from Alain de Botton

Artistic talent is like a brilliant firework which streaks across a pitch-black night, inspiring awe among onlookers but extinguishing itself in seconds, leaving behind only darkness and longing.

The love of flowers is a consequence of modesty and an accommodation with disappointment. Some things need to go permanently wrong before we can start to admire the stem of a rose or the petals of a bluebell.

Art builds up self-knowledge, and is an excellent way of communicating the resulting fruit to other people.

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.

Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.

We need long train journeys on which we have no wireless signal.

Love means admiration for qualities in the lover that promise to correct our weaknesses and imbalances; love is a search for completion.

Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments. We have allowed our love stories to end way too early. We seem to know far too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.

Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.

A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person.

Wanting to sound like other people has its temptations. There are inherited habits of speech guaranteed to make us sound authoritative, intelligent, worldly, appropriately grateful, or deeply moved.

The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons.