Quotes by Alain de Botton

Im fascinated by Comtes clear-eyed analysis of what was wrong with modern society, which is that youve got industrial capitalism on one side and romantic love on the other. Those, along with non-instrumental art, are supposed to get you through the day?

The claims Im making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. Were much more relaxed around those art forms. Were willing to ask, How could this find a place in my heart?

I like working with people. I believe change can only come through collaboration.

Its almost a blessing when we meet people who naturally want to do the sort of things that are in high demand in society. What a gift to do that, as opposed to other people who would say, I want to be a novelist but actually I have to be an accountant.

My dad was a slightly stricter version of Richard Dawkins. The worldview was that there are idiots out there who believe in Santa Claus and fairies and magic and elves, and were not joining that nonsense.

“If one felt successful, thered be so little incentive to be successful.”

“Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.”

“Anyone who isnt embarrassed of who they were last year probably isnt learning enough.”

“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 Yoricks skull.”

“The feeling one has no time to get anything done provides the pressure that guarantees one does get some things done.”

“We dont need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”

“Ones doing well if age improves even slightly ones capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.”

“The media insists on taking what someone didnt mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.”

“Partially undermining the manufacturers 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?”

“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.”

“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”

“...what effacement of the individual ego, a life in science now entailed.”

“The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.”

“The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isnt 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.”

“Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.”