Philosophy Quote by Alain de Botton — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.”

“We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”

“The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.”

“The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future--or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.”

“Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.”

“The meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering but in the development of the soul.”

“All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

“Those who wish to market their good deeds must do well to place their bad deeds on the shelve too.”

“Maybe that's it, [...] [w]ith what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe”

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.”

“Yes, I felt guilt. Somehow I had pushed Fand to the precipice without realizing it, and had I not been so blind, perhaps she wouldn't be trying to pull us all over the edge with her now. I was sure Manannan felt it too-the crushing questions of how we got to this place and whether we could have avoided it, where we went wrong, and whether we would ever learn how not to cock up other people's lives in the course of living our own.”