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
believe god-love bachs-music
Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
reality years giving
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
smartphones interesting challenges
The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
good-relationship capacity
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
jobs perfect excuse
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
fighting balance work-and-life
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
reality optimism lines
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
despair events surrender
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
mind safe mental-health
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
relationship intimacy capacity
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
sadness feelings weakness
Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
falling-in-love confused lying
To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally 'together' - when subjectively we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
thinking people normal
The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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.