Alain de Botton

Switzerland
Born on 20 Dec 1969
Writer / Philosopher

Quotes

Next >>

Clashes of taste are an inevitable by-product of a world where forces continually fragment and deplete us in new ways.

The Architecture of Happiness
The great fortunes of our day have rarely been accumulated through the sale of the most meaningful items and services, such as poetry or relationship counselling.

The News: A User's Manual
Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.

The Consolations of Philosophy
Living is something of an emergency anyway, but our struggles must usually be strenuously concealed. Our anxieties churn away within us, yet on the outside we must smile and deliver upbeat answers to enquiries about how we're doing.

The News: A User's Manual
Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.

The News: A User's Manual
With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-esteem in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities.

The Architecture of Happiness
Our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

How Proust Can Change Your Life
It might be a Proustian slogan: n'allez pas trop vite. And an advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process.

How Proust Can Change Your Life
It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.

How Proust Can Change Your Life
Next >>
Search

 

On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays