Alain de Botton Quotes

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.

I feel prematurely old. I'm actually having this major belated quarter-life crisis. I'm turning 30 in a couple of weeks. I've been thinking a lot about mortality. A lot about what I'm going to do with my life and how to enjoy it. One of the things I'm going to work on is being more spontaneous, letting go, embracing the beauty of come-what-may.

Facing your own mortality forces you to re-evaluate your priorities.

I fear that the day I die, I am going to die without accomplishing what I have in my mind. Life is too short, and a lot of things can happen, and I am really keen to see it with my own eyes - and that is why I am in a hurry.

I tell myself to hurry up, that I have to do everything before death catches me.

'I wish life was not so short,' he thought. 'Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.'

Art is the proper task of life.

Live, so you do not have to look back and say: 'God, how I have wasted my life.'

I wanna live 'til I die, no more, no less.

All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why.

By the age of 50, I would like to know that I'm not dead - that there's some continuity to my life.

As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?

Like my mother, I was always saying, 'I'll fix my life one day.' It became clear when I saw her die without fulfilling her dreams that my time was now or maybe never.

When I was 34, people would say, What's going to happen to you when you're 40? What are you going to do? You don't have much time left. And I was like, what are you talking about?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Some time ago, I told Larry King that I planned to live to be 102. I still do.

My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.

I started out in the 'Cure' reflecting things that I thought were important, and it's reached a point where it takes over and becomes the thing that is important.

In this respect early youth is exactly like old age; it is a time of waiting for a big trip to an unknown destination. The chief difference is that youth waits for the morning limited and age waits for the night train.

I always wanted to live to about 70. I thought that'd be a good age.

I'm not afraid to die - it's just that I had so much left to do in this world.

Things change when you get to 40. I'm embarrassed even that I'm going through it. In a very morbid way, at 40 you become aware of how long you've been on Earth and you start to question what you're going to use the remaining time doing.

I think that everyone at any age should ask themselves, 'where do I want to be today, where do I want to be tomorrow, and where do I want to be in a hundred years?' We all have clear answers to those questions. We only have so much time. It's a real shame if we don't spend our lives trying to do that.

What's really important in life? Sitting on a beach? Looking at television eight hours a day? I think we have to appreciate that we're alive for only a limited period of time, and we'll spend most of our lives working.

You look at how many years you have left, and you start to think: 'How many more films do I have in me?'