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
people accepting offers
How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
philosophy able hysterical
Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
example purpose our-society
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
baby children disappointment
If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.
matter moments significant
A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
always-trying anxiety inarticulate
Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
believe mind needs
We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on your knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves.
ambition simple destiny
A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
men dust sublime
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
danger drawbacks
One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
successful thinking people
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
genius structure inner-life
The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
hate compassion might
Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
survival safe tests
We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.