Alain de Botton

Everyone's more vulnerable than they seem, and I think men are more vulnerable. Once you get close to a man, the whole thing's a facade anyway. I think manhood is fragile.

The problem with airports is that we go there when we need to catch a plane - and because it's so difficult to find the way to the gate, we tend not to look around at our surroundings.

I've tried to write about Heathrow before and been escorted off the premises.

I fell in love with Norman Mailer's 'Of a Fire on the Moon', a description of the 1969 moon landing and the society that had produced NASA - and was inspired by him to begin a kind of anthropology of modern life.

The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.

Parent and child may both love, but - unbeknown to the child - each party is on a different end of the axis. This is why, in adulthood, when we first long for 'love', what we mean is that we want to 'be loved' as we were once loved by a parent.

Parents don't reveal how often they have bitten their tongue, fought back the tears, or been too tired to take off their clothes after a day of childcare. The parent loves, but they do not expect the favour to be returned in any significant way.

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.

The greatest compliment I get about my writing is when people say, 'How did you know so much about me?' And of course, the answer is very simple: 'I just observed myself without sentimentality.'

I'm one of those introverted people who simply feels a lot better after spending time alone thinking through ideas and emotions. This is a sign, I've come to think, of a kind of emotional disturbance - a reaction to inner fragility. I wish I were more able to just act and do, rather than constantly have to retreat and examine and think.

Used to do a lot of falling in love with people, almost in the street, and imagining that there would be no obstacle to a happy love story other than finding the 'right person'.

What I do know from my life is the phenomenon of saying, 'This is too small a thing to argue about', but then nevertheless finding oneself in that argument.

Trying to be a sort of intellectual in the public arena is very irritating to people. They think, 'Why is this bugger on television?'

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

I don't want to say that our expectations of love are too high; it's just that if we're to meet them, we have to become a little more self-aware.

You will often be in despair. You will sometimes think it's the worst decision in your life. That's fine. That's not a sign your marriage has gone wrong. It's a sign that it's normal; it's on track. And many of the hopes that took you into the marriage will have to die in order for the marriage to continue.

If you're understood in maybe, I don't know, 60% of your soul by your partner, that's fantastic. Don't expect that it's going to be 100%. Of course you will be lonely.

Sometimes I say to people, 'Do you think you're easy to live with?' People who are single. And the ones who say, 'Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty easy to live with; it's just a question of finding the right person,' massive alarm bell rings in my mind.

Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere - and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity and weakness and fear and anxiety because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

I tell my children what I think myself: That religion is not necessarily convincing, but it is still interesting and not to be laughed at or denigrated.

There's something called religion, and it was invented a long time ago by people who felt very out of control with their lives, who didn't know... why the sun always rose over the mountains.

I think a certain degree of pessimism is actually helpful to love.

In the early days of love sometimes, you will report an ecstatic feeling you have met someone who seems to understand you without you needing to speak.

Most of the time, we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us; therefore, we are not likely to be forgiving or sympathetic.

Therapy and counseling can do wonderful things for people. But they have emerged so far as what are sometimes called 'cottage industries' - that is, as individuals or small groups offering generally quite expensive services to a few clients.

Often we think love is a feeling: that you spontaneously experience it.

Advertising is - quite often - alive to our real needs. It's just the products on offer might not be the things that will help us satisfy them.

I think of myself as quite a shy person. But when I'm curious about something, I'll go quite far to satisfy my curiosity.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.

A gray V-neck pullover from Gap. I have 30 of them.

My office. It's drab and boring but quiet.

Sometimes my biography is interpreted as the upbringing of a French aristocrat. It was very, very different. We were a family of mercantile, immigrant Jews.

I was told by my father nine times a day that you were going to get a job the minute you finish your studies.

I think it is very possible that my deeper character is not very English.

If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.

Many of our ideas of what love is comes from stories... these are extremely powerful shapers of our attitudes towards love, and I think that, in some ways, often we've got the wrong story.

Among adults, we can admit that of course, characters are creations. They aren't real people.

Asking someone to be with us turns out to be an impossibly demanding and therefore pretty mean thing to suggest to anyone we would really want the best for.

Travel is a lot like love.

Small issues are really just large ones that haven't been accorded the requisite attention.

What we typically call love is only the start of love. Our understanding of love has been hijacked and beguiled by its first distractingly moving moments.

To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone.

The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.

What annoys me about most self-help books is that they have no tragic sense. They have no sense that life is fundamentally incomplete rather than accidentally incomplete.

I guess my overall life plan is to think about issues that concern me and try to use culture generally to make sense of them. I'm more worried that I'm going to die before I've had time.