1,008 Quotes by Alain de Botton

In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings or shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are.

...what effacement of the individual ego, a life in science now entailed.

A slightly more conscious awareness of writing as compensation may lend us energy to acknowledge our unrequited ache for more visceral forms of contact.

It is as if we need to be reminded of convention in order properly to appreciate the wonder of being unguarded...

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.

Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.

Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas.

Logically enough, the office and the nunnery have been singularly popular in the imaginations of pornographers. We should not be surprised to learn that the erotic novels of the early modern period were overwhelmingly focused on debauchery and flagellation amongst clergy in vespers and chapels, just as contemporary Internet pornography is inordinately concerned with fellatios and sodomies performed by office workers against a backdrop of work stations and computer equipment.