Quotes by Alain de Botton

About Alain de Botton:

Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born, British-based philosopher, writer, and television presenter. His books and television programmes discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. At 23, he published Essays in Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004) and The Architecture of Happiness (2006).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

Alain de Botton

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we sho...

Alain de Botton

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the...

Alain de Botton

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous...

Alain de Botton

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

Alain de Botton

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

Alain de Botton

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

Alain de Botton

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have...

Alain de Botton

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actu...

Alain de Botton

Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our prioriti...

Alain de Botton

Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

Alain de Botton

Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated....

Alain de Botton

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of ident...

Alain de Botton

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally ...

Alain de Botton

Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectabil...

Alain de Botton

The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Alain de Botton

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...

Alain de Botton

It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.

Alain de Botton

We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained.

Alain de Botton

In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does ...

Alain de Botton

A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own di...

Alain de Botton

Author Bio

  • NameAlain de Botton
  • DescriptionSwiss writer
  • BornDecember 20, 1969
  • CountrySwitzerland
  • ProfessionWriter; Philosopher; Publisher
  • WorksThe Architecture Of Happiness