Alain de Botton

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

"Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back."

"Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from."

"Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control."

"Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time."

"The most courageous act in politics is to try to understand your opponent."

"Just be yourself' is about the worst advice you can give some people."

"Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail."

"It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great."

"The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person."

"We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us."

"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."

"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 domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are."

"The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language."

"Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'."

"The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness"."

"Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself."

"Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice."

"It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes — hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways — and that’s okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we’re all these incredibly fragile beings."

"Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don't yet know what to do with."