Alain de Botton

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

"If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful."

"We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness..."

"Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope."

"The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts."

"Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason."

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

"The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be."

"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy."

"The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be."

"There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life."

"The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that."

"I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it."