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
real judgement intuition
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
love-is smartphones desire
True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
writing sane
My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
art world devotion
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
motivation inspiration careers
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
annoyed honour
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
art pain envy
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.
luxury views understanding
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
writing self careers
Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
doing-nothing exceed
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
children parent mind
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
book emotion good-book
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
stuff crowds tales
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
beautiful beautiful-things our-lives
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.