A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other.

— Alain de Botton

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

— 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

After Carol had left, as Sons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited--long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms--what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling.

— Alain de Botton

A fundamental truth, is that there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing. People are only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don’t dare or know how to communicate them to others. 

— Alain de Botton

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

— 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

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

And yet, troubling, there is one difference between 'labor' 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 labor feels pain.

— Alain de Botton

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

— Alain de Botton