Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

— Alain de Botton

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself.

— Alain de Botton

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

— Alain de Botton

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

— Alain de Botton

As the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

— Alain de Botton

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us BARDA Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the center of the ashtray. Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present.

— Alain de Botton

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

— Alain de Botton

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.

— Alain de Botton

At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident.

— Alain de Botton

At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of freeway, is a diner frequented by truck drivers who have either just unloaded or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families.

— Alain de Botton