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
gratitude grateful sight
One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
mistake degrees imagine
The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
revenge intelligent true-evil
Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
mean media
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
practice play violin
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
destiny stronger longing
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
museums secular-society ideas
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
falling-in-love lying believe
If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?
self ideas risk
We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.
nightmare
Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
believe divorce unhappy
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
glasses understanding hurtful
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
god soul world
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
smartphones interesting challenges
The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.