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
heart people special
We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
drawing looks awareness
The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
vision use snob
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
understanding findings closest
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
stranger conversation fanatics
It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
achievement ordinary enough
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
knowing exciting fulfilling
Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
happiness emotional expression
Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
art pain philosophy
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer 's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
esoteric blunt connected
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
powerful emotional thinking
I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
infidelity growing calming
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
action cures tendencies
The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
beautiful appreciation pain
It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.