Alain de Botton Book Quotations

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.

Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad...

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.