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Alain de Botton Quotes
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Alain de Botton, FRSL is a Swiss-born British philosopher and author. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love , which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life , Status Anxiety and The Architecture of Happiness .

He co-founded The School of Life in 2008 and Living Architecture in 2009. In 2015, he was awarded "The Fellowship of Schopenhauer", an annual writers' award from the Melbourne Writers Festival, for this work. Wikipedia  

✵ 20. December 1969   •   Other names آلن دو باتن, Alan de Botton
Alain de Botton photo
Alain de Botton: 146   quotes 62   likes

Alain de Botton Quotes

“Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter II, Consolation For Not having Enough Money, p. 65.

Joy

“In an essay entitled ‘The Poet’, published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty. He contrasted the nostalgic devotees of old-fashioned poetry with those whom he judged to be true contemporary poetic spirits, deserving of the title less by virtue of anything they had actually written than for their willingness to approach the world without prejudice or partiality. The former camp, he averred, ‘see the factory-village and the railway, and fancy that the beauty of the landscape is broken up by these, for they are not yet consecrated in their reading. But the true poet sees them fall within the great order of nature not less than the beehive or the spider’s geometrical web.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 216.

Age , World , Beauty , Fashion

“Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, p. 92.

“The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left … having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 168.

Age , Peace , Universe

“The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 80.

“Deciding to avoid other people does not necessarily equate with having no desire whatsoever for company; it may simply reflect a dissatisfaction with what—or who—is available. Cynics are, in the end, only idealists with awkwardly high standards. In Chamfort’s words, “It is sometimes said of a man who lives alone that he does not like society. This is like saying of a man he does not like going for walks because he is not fond of walking at night in the forêt de Bondy.””

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety (2004), p. 119.

People , Night

“Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter III, Consolation For Frustration, p. 84.

Life , Rage

“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.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 127.

Optimism , Knowledge , Reality , Parting

“An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 126-127.

Hunger , Truth , Literature , Understanding

“Alcohol-inspired fights … are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 45-46.

Alcohol , Fight

“Life is near-death experience.”

Alain de Botton

As quoted in de Botton's School of Life lecture, 'On Pessimism' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw1oLtuJOXQ,
[transcript] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BcpQlEBiGT6sYmMY8wz0F1rqoWjfC6J-40vhHQZFxxY/edit?pli=1

Life , Death

“Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 244.

“Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter IV, Consolation For Inadequacy, p. 122.

“I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to brand performance. … Something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting that the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 83-84.

War , Beauty , Art , Intelligence

“The unremitting division of labour resulted in admirable levels of productivity. The company’s success appeared to bear out the principles of efficiency laid down at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorized that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers. … But however great the economic advantages of segmenting the elements of an afternoon’s work into a range of forty-year-long careers, there was reason to wonder about the unintended side effects of doing so. In particular, one felt tempted to ask … how meaningful the lives might feel as a result.”

Alain de Botton

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)

Feeling , Knowledge , Appearance , Success

“It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter I, Consolations For Unpopularity, p. 16.

“Symons … remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited—long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms—what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 113.

Stupidity , Family , Law , Error

“True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter I, Consolations For Unpopularity, p. 33.

“I … thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.”

Alain de Botton

p 102-103.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)

Sincerity

“These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 281.

World , Idea , Effort , Heart

“We should not be frightened by appearances.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter VI, Consolation For Difficulties, p. 206.

Appearance

“Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), Chapter I, Consolations For Unpopularity, p. 7.

Confidence

“The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although—to the more imaginative at least—a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 15-16.

Travel , Imagination , Study , Indifference

“For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.”

Alain de Botton

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), p. 288.

Understanding , Appearance , Patience