Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us. - Alain de Botton
A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments. - Alain de Botton
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. - Alain de Botton
We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness... - Alain de Botton
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury. - Alain de Botton
A good half of the art of living is resilience. - Alain de Botton
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. - Alain de Botton
One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy. - Alain de Botton
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? - Alain de Botton
Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control. - 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 feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done. - Alain de Botton
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them. - Alain de Botton
The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality. - Alain de Botton
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did. - Alain de Botton
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person. - Alain de Botton
Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold. - Alain de Botton
And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain. - Alain de Botton
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass. - Alain de Botton
Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly. - Alain de Botton
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning. - Alain de Botton
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough. - Alain de Botton
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason. - Alain de Botton
Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back. - Alain de Botton
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me? - Alain de Botton
Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself. - Alain de Botton
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to. - Alain de Botton
Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with. - Alain de Botton
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful. - 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. - Alain de Botton
Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail. - Alain de Botton
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts. - Alain de Botton
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom. - Alain de Botton
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us. - Alain de Botton
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself. - Alain de Botton
The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent. - Alain de Botton
Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people. - Alain de Botton
Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound. - Alain de Botton
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great. - Alain de Botton
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough. - Alain de Botton
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice. - Alain de Botton
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time. - Alain de Botton
Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas. - Alain de Botton
To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect. - Alain de Botton
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them. - Alain de Botton
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life. - Alain de Botton
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope. - Alain de Botton
Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from. - Alain de Botton
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money. - Alain de Botton
Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'. - Alain de Botton