Alain de Botton Quotes

I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.

I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be. I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than what I was.

I don't know anyone who hasn't woken up one morning, one day in their life and wish they were someone else, or wish they could do something or wish they were capable of something.

Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct.

Yes, what is it like? Certainly not like she dreamed. But maybe that's okay. We want what we want. At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't--and perhaps loses track of just where she is.

Do I really need to prove anything to anybody? I don't feel that I have to prove anything. The only thing that I have to prove is to myself, that I have value.

I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.

I think the whole idea of me was that I wasn't going to be but that I wanted to be, desperately.

I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person.

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

I feel like 2013 was one giant snowball of me being confused with my place in life and within the group. A lot of it was self-confidence issues, a lot of outside issues, and a lot of me questioning the future of what I was doing. And my mistake was letting all that influence me so that I wasn't the best I could be in life!

To dream of the person you would like to be is to waste the person you are.

I have always felt like I was just sort of waiting to catch up to the rest of myself.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.

Come on now! How could you be me and want to be someone else?

Self-realization sounds good. But what if only an enraged dwarf emerges?

You must learn to overcome your very natural and appropriate revulsion for your own work.

Shedding off one more layer of skin, Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Oh, the secret life of man and woman--dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest.

All through the night, she battled herself. Or battled to know herself. She fell apart and then put herself back together and then she fell apart again and put herself back together, over and over.

You're dying with the way things are," Della Lee said harshly, causing Josey to lower the handful of popcorn she was about to put in her mouth. "You're going to lose yourself in this, Josey. It's going to happen if you don't change. I know. I lost myself trying to find happiness in things that didn't love me back.

And although she was sometimes dissatisfied with herself, she felt unable to go beyond her own limitations. Books were safer.

Once again, I've been thwarted by the massive difference between my vision of the successful me and the me I'm currently stuck with.