If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be... - Alain de Botton

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

"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."

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

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