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Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton Quotes

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Famous Alain de Botton Quotes

“Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never had the strength to make it this far).”

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Book:A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
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“...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.”

RelationshipsWorkEmotionsWorkplaceDynamicsFamilies
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. We are looking to re-create, within our adult relationships, the very feelings we knew so well in childhood and which were rarely limited to just tenderness and care. The love most of us will have tasted early on came entwined with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his or her anger, or of not feeling secure enough to communicate our trickier wishes. How logical, then, that we should as adults find ourselves rejecting certain candidates not because they are wrong but because they are a little too right—in the sense of seeming somehow excessively balanced, mature, understanding, and reliable—given that, in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign and unearnt. We chase after more exciting others, not in the belief that life with them will be more harmonious, but out of an unconscious sense that it will be reassuringly familiar in its patterns of frustration.”

LoveRelationshipsAttractionFamiliarity
Book:The Course of Love
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“When we aren’t aiming to be either precise or conclusive, it can be easy to agree on what a beautiful man-made place might look like. Attempts to name the world’s most attractive cities tend to settle on some familiar locations: Edinburgh, Paris, Rome, San Francisco. A case will occasionally be made for Siena or Sydney. Someone may bring up St Petersburg or Salamanca. Further evidence of our congruent tastes can be found in the patterns of our holiday migrations. Few people opt to spend the summer in Milton Keynes or Frankfurt. Nevertheless, our intuitions about attractive architecture have always proved of negligible use in generating satisfactory laws of beauty. We might expect that it would, by now, have grown as easy to reproduce a city with the appeal of Bath as it is to manufacture consistent quantities of blueberry jam. If humans were at some point adept at creating a masterwork of urban design, it should have come within the grasp of all succeeding generations to contrive an equally successful environment at will. There ought to be no need to pay homage to a city as to a rare creature; its virtues should be readily fitted to the development of any new piece of meadow or scrubland. There should be no need to focus our energies on preservation and restoration, disciplines which thrive on our fears of our own ineptitude. We should not have to feel alarmed by the waters that lap threateningly against Venice’s shoreline. We should have the confidence to surrender the aristocratic palaces to the sea, knowing that we could at any point create new edifices that would rival the old stones in beauty.”

DesignTravelArchitectureUrban Planning
Book:The Architecture of Happiness
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“the word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equations between social rank and human worth”

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Book:Status Anxiety
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“În mod stereotip, în discursurile de absolvire, educația liberală se identifică cu acumularea înțelepciunii și a cunoașterii de sine, dar aceste scopuri par a fi fost pierdute din vedere de metodologia actuală a predării și a examinării. Dacă le judecăm după ceea ce fac, și nu neapărat după ceea ce pretind cu atâta lejeritate, universitățile produc o majoritate de profesioniști foarte bine orientați (avocați, medici, ingineri) și o minoritate de absolvenți de arte bine informați cultural, dar derutați moral, panicați în legătură cu modul în care își vor câștiga existența de acum încolo. Implicit, i-am încredințat sistemului nostru de învățământ academic o misiune duală și posibil contradictorie: aceea de a ne învăța cum să ne câștigăm traiul și de a ne învăța cum să trăim. Iar pe cea de-a doua am pierdut-o, în mod inconștient, din vedere. (...) noi am construit o lume intelectuală în care cle mai apreciate instituții rareori se obosesc să pună cele mai serioase întrebări ale sufletului, darămite să le mai și dea răspuns. Pentru a rezolva incongruențele, am putea începe să ne remaniem universitățile eliminând domenii precum istoria și literatura, categorii eminamente superficiale și care, chiar dacă acoperă un material valoros, nu urmăresc ele însele temele care ne bântuie cel mai tare sufletele.”

LiteraturaIstorieAlain De BottonReligia Pentru AteiUniversitateEducațiePrograma Universitară
Book:Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion
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“For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations.... 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 a bicycle.”

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Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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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 communicatiors must have been blessed with caregivers who knew 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 offsping 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. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.”

Good Communicator
Book:The Course of Love
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“Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be like a mount to be scaled, it is dangerous, obscure and demanding. Under the light of the library reading room, the academics' motto reads: the more a text makes me suffer, the truer it must be.”

LoveTruthBooksAlain De Botton
Book:The Romantic Movement: Sex, Shopping, and the Novel
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“It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other’s imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes — hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways — and that’s okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we’re all these incredibly fragile beings.”

Life LessonsRelationshipListeningAlain De Botton
Author:Alain de Botton
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“Perfecțiunea exercită o anume tiranie, aproape o epuizare, ceva care neagă privitorului un rol în propria creație și care se impune cu tot dogmatismul unei afirmații lipsite de ambiguitate. Adevărata frumusețe nu poate fi măsurată pentru că fluctuează, exostă numai câteva unghiuri din care poate fi văzută și nici atunci în orice luminp și în orice moment. Flirtează periculos cu urâțenia, își asumă riscuri, nu se aliniază confortabil cu regulile matematice ale proporției și este atrăgătoare tocmai prin acele aspecte care se pretează la urâțenie.”

Alain De BottonOn LoveFrumusețePerfecțiuneEseuri De îNdrăgostit
Book:On Love
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“Unul dintre dezastele neașteptate ale epocii moderne este acela că accesul incomparabil la informație a venit cu prețul incapacității noastre de a ne concentra cu adevărat asupra vreunui lucru. Gândirea profundă, introspectivă, care a generat multe dintre cele mai importante realizări ale omenirii este ținta unui atac fără precedent. Întotdeauna avem prin preajmă un aparat care ne garantează un refugiu fascinant și lasciv din fața realității. Sentimentele și gândurile pe care am omis să le trăim în timp ce ne uitam la ecranele noastre își găsesc debușeul în tresăriri involuntare și în capacitatea noastră tot mai scăzută de a adormi când trebuie.”

Alain De BottonReligia Pentru AteiCultura ModernăGândire
Book:Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion
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“After Carol had left, as Symons threw away a pile of used tissues and rearranged the cushions on the couch, he remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [as a career counselor] 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.”

WorkCallingMistakesMeaningCareer Counseling
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should.”

ThinkingRealityInformationAccessConcentrationAchievementsElectronics
Book:Religion for Atheists: A non-believer's guide to the uses of religion
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