Alain de Botton Quotes

Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order.

Life is just the time between crapping yourself.

What Im trying to say is that what makes you up, its always been around, and it always will be around. So really the only thing you should worry about is the part you're at right now. Where you got a body and a head and all that bullshit. Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.

Death is fortunate for the child, bitter to the youth, too late to the old.

As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

If you try to stay young forever, you don't really live.

It is only in the light of the inescapable fact of death that a person can adequately engage and enter upon the mysterious fact of life.

I am really curious about life, about why we are all here. I notice my skin is ageing, things are changing, I've seen people dying, so that's the train we are all on.

Birth and death are the most singular events we experience - and the contemplation of death, as of birth, should be a thing of beauty, not ignobility.

Who does understand life?

I'm aging, and the world is seeing it.

Such is life and life is such and after all it isn't much. First a cradle. Then a hearse. It might have been better, but it could have been worse.

I'm not a machine.

Evolution tells us how to survive; art tells us how it's possible still to live even while knowing that we and all we love will someday vanish. It says there's beauty even in grief, freedom even inside the strictures of form and of life. What's liberating isn't what's simplest; it's the ability to include more and more shadows, colors and possibilities inside any moment's meeting of self and world.

Among human beings there is no greater banality than death. Second in order, because it is possible to die without being born, comes birth, and next comes marriage.

... deprived of pain, and also deprived of danger, able to do what it wants, [Nature] does not need us, nor understands our deserts, and it cannot be angry.

When we are no longer children, we are already dead.

The child's toys and the old man's reasons are the fruits of two seasons.

And what's a life? - a weary pilgrimage, Whose glory in one day doth fill the stage With childhood, manhood, and decrepit age.

After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

Self-awareness is a supreme gift, a treasure as precious as life. This is what makes us human. But it comes with a costly price: the wound of mortality. Our existence is forever shadowed by the knowledge that we will grow, blossom, and, inevitably, diminish and die.

As the sun is best seen at his rising and setting, so men's native dispositions are clearest seen when they are children, and when they are dying.

Death is a part of life ... and that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does.