Alain de Botton

"I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas."

"The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things that kinda need to be mentioned. But often the romantic view is to say, 'If you loved me, you wouldn't criticise me.' Actually, true love is often about trying to teach someone how to be the best version of themselves."

"Katie Price is no exception. She, too, is - in a distinctive way - a philosopher. Partially, Katie Price's philosophy is one of extraordinary confidence. She is remarkable not for her looks or antics but because of her tremendous self-assurance and her unwillingness to be intimidated by criticism or failure."

"It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant."

"Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are."

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

"Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice."

"“Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.”"

"What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others."

"One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on."

"We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb."

"We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds."

"The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life."

"Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person."

"He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that."

"Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge."

"The more people you have to ask for permission, the more dangerous a project gets."

"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."

"To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect."

"The second hugely seductive move is to signal that we view the other person with a mixture of tenderness and realism. It’s often imagined that it’ll be seductive to convey an air of adoration, to hint that the other strikes us as exceptionally attractive or accomplished. But surprisingly, it is deeply worrying to be obviously adored, because everyone, from the inside, knows very well that they don’t deserve intense acclaim, are often disappointing and sometimes quite simply pitiful. So seduction involves suggesting both that one likes the other person a lot – and yet can see their frailty quite clearly, that one cope with it and forgive it with gentle indulgence. One might, towards the end of the evening drop in a small warm tease that alludes to our understanding of some less than perfect side of them: ‘I suppose you stayed under the duvet feeling a bit sorry for yourself after that?’ we might ask, with a benign smile. Such a gesture implies that we like another person not under a mistaken notion that they are flawless but with a full and unfrightened appreciation of their frailties. That ends up being powerfully seductive because it is, first and foremost, reassuring. It suggests the ideal way that we would like someone to view us within the testing conditions of a real relationship. We crave not admiration, but to be properly known and yet still liked and forgiven."