Alain de Botton Quotes

There's absolutely no way you can feel the freedom to embarrass and humiliate yourself unless you have finally recognized that your identity is in someone other than yourself.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn't, then why would you say I am.

What the heck did people see in me?

People have been so busy relating to how I look, it's a miracle I didn't become a self-conscious blob of protoplasm.

I've given up trying to understand what people think about me.

I was brought up to believe that how I saw myself was more important than how others saw me.

I'm curious by individuals that embrace half a story so they can justify how incomplete they feel about their own self worth.

Don't believe what anyone tells you about yourself.

Very idle is all curiosity concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remaining unknown is not less so.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

He had an opinion of himself, I think, that was too high for his own good. Or maybe it was the reverse. Maybe it was a low opinion that he kept trying to erase.

Whether at work, at home or in public, we have been trained to believe that who we are at the core of our being is often unacceptable. As a result, we work diligently to live up to - and sometimes down to - what others have made us out to be, whether or not it is an accurate reflection of who we are.

I don't always understand my worth.

My mama told me it's not what they call you - it's what you answer to.

Lots of us when we're children believe 'oh well, if the world knew us as we really are, they'd know what wonderful, clever, brilliant, charming people we really are.'

If you don't believe you don't belong.

With a fractured sense of self, we come to depend on what people feed back to us - often mediated through social networks - not what we are. We have complex identities but may become less able to act as a subject - confident in what we really are.

At some point, the pride has to be a part of the whole day-to-day oeuvre. It's part of who you are and doesn't need to be discussed anymore.

Feeling comfortable in my own skin has never been easy for me.

My opinion about myself is so based on what other people think of me.

My dad used to say, 'You wouldn't worry so much about what people thought about you if you knew how seldom they did.

I do know one thing about me: I don't measure myself by others' expectations or let others define my worth.

Nobody walks this earth thinking he's better than I think I am - I think I'm great. At the same time, it's so obvious to me that I'm nobody.

You can't ever put your self-definition in the hands of somebody who meets you for 15 minutes.

I often worry that my idea of personhood is nostalgic, irrational, inaccurate.