Alain de Botton Quotes

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Alain de Botton

Profession : Writer

Birth : December 20, 1969

The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of attracting money and prestige in a world obsessed by the achievements of science.

Alain de Botton

Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.

Alain de Botton

I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

Alain de Botton

There's a constant tension between the excitement of new people and security with one person. If you go with excitement, you create chaos; you hurt people. There's jealousy, and it gets very messy. If you have security, it can be boring, and you die inside because of all the opportunities missed.

Alain de Botton

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

Alain de Botton

Where is instruction in relationships, in the management of career, in the raising of children, in the pursuit of friendship, in the wise approach to anxiety and death? All this sort of stuff I craved to learn about when I was a student and down to this day.

Alain de Botton

The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is that we find lovely in them - the visions of friendship, togetherness, repose, or whatever. And then consider what would actually help us find these qualities in our lives.

Alain de Botton

I'm not an academic philosopher, and don't agree with the way the universities approach the subject. I'm a philosopher only in the very loose sense of someone interested in wisdom and well-being attained through reason. But I'm as interested in psychoanalysis and art as I am in philosophy.

Alain de Botton

The thing is that love gives us a ringside seat on somebody else's flaws, so of course you're gonna spot some things that kinda need to be mentioned. But often the romantic view is to say, 'If you loved me, you wouldn't criticise me.' Actually, true love is often about trying to teach someone how to be the best version of themselves.

Alain de Botton

If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.

Alain de Botton

Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.

Alain de Botton

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

Alain de Botton

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

Alain de Botton

Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in calm, stretch our sympathies, reignite our senses, and reawaken appreciation.

Alain de Botton

Often we think love is a feeling: that you spontaneously experience it.

Alain de Botton

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

Alain de Botton

The person who is truly best suited to us is not the person who shares our tastes, but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently and wisely.

Alain de Botton

Work is a way of bringing order to chaos, and there's a basic satisfaction in seeing that we are able to make something a little more coherent by the end of the day.

Alain de Botton

We don't sulk with everybody. We limit our sulks to a very particular person: the person who's supposed to love us and understand us. And we make this equation that if you love me, you're supposed to understand me even if I don't explain what's wrong.

Alain de Botton

Travel is a lot like love.

Alain de Botton