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
annoyed anxiety political
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
ambition anxiety contemporary
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
anxiety might expecting
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
photography anxiety losing
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
anxiety shifting triggers
as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
always-trying anxiety inarticulate
Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
worry anxiety enjoy-life
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
pain envy anxiety
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
goal anxiety promise
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
thinking opposites anxiety
Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
disgusted finally nature totally wasteful
I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.
meeting run sit
When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.
bad concepts describe good heaven hell invented virtue
Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good doing bad and it's nice to help someone.
kids might
I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.