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Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton Quotes

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Famous Alain de Botton Quotes

“I found myself wishing that the rest of mankind would follow the engineers' example and agree on a series of symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and often painful psychological states — a code which might help us feel less tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and silent exchanges of equations.”

LanguageUnderstandingLonelinessCommunicationEngineeringEquations
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future--or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.”

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Book:The Course of Love
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“Those who have made architectural beauty their life's work know only too well how futile their efforts can prove. After an exhaustive study of the buildings of Venice, in a moment of depressive lucidity, John Ruskin acknowledged that few Venetians in fact seemed elevated by their city, perhaps the most beautiful urban tapestry in the world. Endowed with a power that is often as unreliable as it is inexpressible, architecture will always compere poorly with utilitarian demands for humanity's resources. How hard is it to make a case for the cost of tearing down and rebuilding a mean but serviceable street. How awkward to have to defend, in the face of more tangible needs, the benefits of re-aligning a crooked lamppost or replacing an ill-matched window frame. Beautiful architecture has none of the unambiguous advantages of a vaccine or a bowl of rice. In construction will hence never be raised to a dominant political priority, for even if the whole man-made world could, through relentless effort and sacrifice, be modeled to rival St Mark's square ...[ ..] , we would still often be in a bad mood.”

BeautyArchitectureUtilitarianism
Book:The Architecture of Happiness
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“Η τελειότητα ενέχει κάτι σαν τυραννία, ίσως και κάτι εξουθενωτικό, αρνείται στο θεατή ένα ρόλο στη δημιουργία της και επιβάλλεται με το δογματισμό απερίφραστης δήλωσης. Μα η αληθινή ομορφιά δεν είναι μετρήσιμη, έχει διακυμάνσεις, είναι ορατή από λίγες μόνο γωνίες, και πάλι όχι με κάθε φωτισμό ούτε κάθε στιγμή. Ερωτοτροπεί επικίνδυνα με την ασχήμια, διακινδυνεύει να εκτεθεί, δε συνάδει βολικά με μαθηματικούς τύπους περί αναλογιών, αντλεί τη γοητεία της από στοιχεία που υπηρετούν εξίσου την ασχήμια. Ίσως είναι αναγκαίο η ομορφιά να ρισκάρει προμελετημένα με λίγη ασχήμια.”

Beauty
Book:On Love
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“We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.”

LifeReasonGodAtheismMoralityMoralsCommandmentsSuperstition
Book:Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion
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“What lies behind this tendency to read things as part of a destiny? Perhaps only its opposite, the anxiety of contingency, the fear that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained face awaiting) and that what may or may not be happening to us (whom we may or may not be meeting on airplanes) has no sense beyond what we choose to attribute to it - in short, the anxiety that there is no God to tell our story and hence assure our loves.”

DestinyRomantic Fatalism
Book:Essays in Love
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“Once a partner has begun to lose interest, there is apparently little the other can do to arrest the process. Like seduction, withdrawal suffers under a blanket of reticence. The very breakdown of communication is hard to discuss, unless both parties have a desire to see it restored. This leaves the lover in a desperate situation. Honest dialogue seems to produce only irritation and smothers love in the attempt to revive it. Desperate to woo the partner back at any cost, the lover might at this point be tempted to turn to romantic terrorism, the product of irredeemable situations, a gamut of tricks (sulking, jealousy, guilt) that attempt to force the partner to return love, by blowing up (in fits of tears, rage or otherwise) in front of the loved one. The terroristic partner knows he cannot realistically hope to see his love reciprocated, but the futility of something is not always (in love or in politics) a sufficient argument against it. Certain things are said not because they will be heard, but because it is important to speak.”

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Book:On Love
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“Chloe's holiday story was dull, but its dullness was no longer a criterion of judgment. I'd ceased to consider it according to the secular logic of ordinary conversations. I was no longer concerned to locate within its syntax either intellectual insight or poetic truth. What mattered was not so much what she was saying , as the fact, she was saying it. And that I had decided to find perfection in everything she might choose to utter. I felt ready to follow her into every anecdote, I was ready to love every one of her jokes that had missed its punchline, every reflection that had lost its thread. (...) I felt ready to abandon self-absorption for the sake of total empathy, to follow Chloe into each of her possible selves, to catalog every one of her memories, to become a historian of her childhood, to learn of all her loves, fears and hatreds... everything that could possibly have played itself out within her mind and body had suddenly grown fascinating.”

LoveInfatuation
Book:Essays in Love
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“What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love.”

ChildrenFamilyAcceptanceCommunicationParentingParentsSelf AcceptanceSelf KnowledgeCommunicators
Book:The Course of Love
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“We are not individually much cleverer than the average animal, a heron or a mole, but the knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire. Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects – and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at maths; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage. The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds – a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.”

LifePsychologyEmotionsInsight
Book:The School of Life: An Emotional Education
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“What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.”

DeathTimeWorkTechnologyRevolutionSociologyPermanenceAchievementsAnachronisms
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?”

DeathWorkBusinessProductsMarketingMeaningBettermentPromotions
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime. But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.”

NatureWonderTechnologyHumilityAweSublime
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.”

HappinessWorkBeliefs
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“We must concede that adultery cannot be a workable answer, for no one can be its victim and not feel forever cut to the core. A single meaningless adventure truly does have a recurring habit of ending everything. It's impossible for the victims of adultery to appreciate what might actually have been going through a partner's mind during the 'betrayal', when they lay entwined with a stranger for a few hours. We can hear their defence as often as we like, but we'll be sure of one thing in our hearts: that they were hell-bent on humiliating us and that every ounce of their love has evaporated, along with their status as trustworthy humans. To insist on any other conclusion is like arguing against a tide.”

BetrayalAdultery
Book:The Course of Love
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“If as adults we have even a measure of mental health, it is almost certainly because, when we were helpless infants, there was a person (to whom we essentially owe our lives) who pushed their needs to one side for a time in order to focus wholly on ours. They interpreted what we could not quite say, they guessed what might be ailing us, they settled and consoled us. They keyp the chaos and noise at bay and cut the world up into manageable pieces for us.”

PsychologyChildhood
Author:Alain de Botton
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“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.”

LifeRealityHopeAngerBitternessAspirationsDisappointments
Book:Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion
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“I can't understand people who don't like chocolate. I was once going out with a guy, this guy Robert I was telling you about, and I was never really comfortable with him, but I couldn't work out why. Then one day it all became clear: he didn't like chocolate. I mean he didn't just not love it, this guy actually hated it. You could have put a bar in front of him and he wouldn't have touched it. That kind of thinking is so far removed from anything I can relate to, you know. Well, after that, you can imagine, it was clear we had to break up.”

ChocolateChloe
Book:On Love
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“We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology... but when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day summit to the management of a bathroom, and positevely absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out for dinner. Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can't be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counter- arguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character. The two parties just hope the problems - so boring to them both - will simply go away.”

Couples Fights
Book:The Course of Love
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“We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.”

LifeSelfRelationshipsSignificanceMelodramaSorrows
Book:Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion
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“It is not only the hostility of others that may prevent us from questioning the status quo. Our will to doubt can be just as powerfully sapped by an internal sense that societal conventions must have a sound basis, even if we are not sure exactly what this may be, because they have been adhered to by a great many people for a long time. It seems implausible that our society could be gravely mistaken in its beliefs, and at the same time, that we would be alone in noticing the fact. We stifle our doubts, and follow the flock, because we cannot conceive of ourselves as pioneers of hitherto unknown difficult truths. It is for help in overcoming our meekness that we can turn to the philosopher.”

PhilosophyCourageDoubtPhilosophy Of LifeConformityQuestioningStatus QuoConventional WisdomConvention
Author:Alain de Botton
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“Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5) The acquaintance with new species of the human race--- their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetime---and seldom or never is.”

PhilosophyTravelExplorersScientistsAccomplish Great ThingsAccomplish The ImpossibleAlexander Von Humboldt
Book:The Art of Travel
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