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
thinking
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
drinking self drawing
The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
beautiful commitment giving
We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
sex believe rejection
Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
lying heart frustration
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
thinking people matter
Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
impossible worried minutes
Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
people forgiving goes-on
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
love-and-friendship debt world
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
valuable tedious ifs
Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
art suffering important
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
dream art people
The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
people want dignity
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
good-life taken ideas
It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?