Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton, FRSLis a Swiss-born, British-based self-help philosopher and public speaker. His books and television programmes discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. At 23, he published Essays in Love, which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life, Status Anxietyand The Architecture of Happiness...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth20 December 1969
teacher writing careers
An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming.
majority stem reasoning
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
happiness quests dynamics
If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
reality choices painting
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole...
reality abbreviations artistic
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
religion sublime landscape
It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
book sadness console
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad...
hurt pain giving-up
Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
successful exciting interest
A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
art choices might
Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
book secret maps
The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
roots tree doe
How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
numbers worry people
What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
book writing sick
It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.