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
people personality might
People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
jobs work not-good-enough
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
successful incentives littles
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
love two people
The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
annoyed honour
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
real judgement intuition
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
bitterness
Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
luxury views understanding
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
art pain envy
No one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfillment.
tiny disappointing bigs
What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
nice sunset daffodil
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
doing-nothing exceed
Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
friendship travel company-we-keep
Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
lonely book writing
Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.