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Alain de Botton
63 quotes
“Life is near-death experience.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Not everyone is worth listening to.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. … At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question “What will make me happy?” as “What will make me healthy?” … Our souls do not spell out their troubles.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Though the terrain of frustration may be vast — from a stubbed toe to an untimely death — at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We should not be frightened by appearances.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices, telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown our the faint sounds emitted from our souls, and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all to easily confused with clownishness.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Year-end financial statements … express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable—yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating—than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, … and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity—suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[These entrepreneurs] were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, … but by a lack of custom.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "The Art of Connection – A Conversation with Alain de Botton" by Kim Nagy in Wild River Review (19 November 2007).
“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.”
Alain de Botton (born 1969) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source