Alain de Botton
171 quotes
Biography
"I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it."
"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us."
"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy."
"The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be."
"Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them."
"The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that."
"There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life."
"Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to."
"The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts."
"Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason."
"Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope."
"If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful."
"It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces."
"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."
"Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life."
"The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true."
"Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability."
"We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness..."
"Life is near-death experience."
"I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that. In another age, I might have been an academic in a university, if the university system had been different. So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time."
"This ideal University of Life … would never take the importance of culture for granted. It would know that culture is kept alive by a constant respectful questioning—not by an excessive and snobbish attitude of respect. Therefore, rather than leaving it hanging why one was reading Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, an ideal course covering nineteenth-century literature would ask plainly “What is it that adultery ruins in a marriage?” Students in the ideal University of Life would end up knowing much the same material as their colleagues in other institutions, they would simply have learned it under a very different set of headings."
"Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval."
"It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work."
"It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public."
"Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals? Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first."