Quotes from Alain de Botton

There is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

Architecture excites our respect to the extent that it surpasses us.

We are seekers of beauty, but avoid extravagance. We admire learning, but are unimpressed by pedantry. For us, wealth is an aim for its value when used, not as an empty boast. And the disgrace of poverty lies not in the admission of it, but more in the failure to avoid it in practice.

There is no better way of coming to be aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.

Compatibility is an achievement of love, it shouldn't be the precondition of love.

Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.

Lovers may kill their own love story for no other reason than that they are unable to tolerate the uncertainty, the sheer risk, that their experiment in happiness has delivered.

We will live in more beautiful, wise and humane communities when we have learnt to reorient the system of ambition, when the most driven and energetic individuals have the chance to win honour through work that taps into mankind's highest needs.

Every person we envy holds out a piece of the jigsaw about our possible later achievements.

Repression, a degree of restraint, and a little dedication to self-editing belong to love just as surely as a capacity for explicit confession.

If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves.

The development of the artist provides a profound model of the process of maturation.