Alain de Botton

It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.

— Alain de Botton people

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

— Alain de Botton art

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

— Alain de Botton art

What bothers me is that there is so much emphasis on food, rather than gathering and meeting - so that there is all this effort in creating the right food, whereas the food is only a small part of whether the encounter is successful or not.

— Alain de Botton success

I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

— Alain de Botton success

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 love

Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.

— Alain de Botton life

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

— Alain de Botton living

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

— Alain de Botton philosophy

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 war

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

— Alain de Botton marriage

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other.

— Alain de Botton religion

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

— Alain de Botton writers

I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

— Alain de Botton ideas

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

— Alain de Botton people

I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay, rather than the novel.

— Alain de Botton love

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 philosophy

I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.

— Alain de Botton art

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 action

I am not a foodie, thank goodness. I will eat pretty much anything. A lot of my friends are getting incredibly fussy about food and I see it as a bit of an affliction.

— Alain de Botton friends

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

— Alain de Botton funny

It's 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.'

— Alain de Botton people

As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.

— Alain de Botton depression

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

— Alain de Botton writing

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

— Alain de Botton nature

Its very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether its a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.

— Alain De Botton people

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

— Alain de Botton fear

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

— Alain de Botton love

The unremitting division of labour resulted in admirable levels of productivity. The company’s success appeared to bear out the principles of efficiency laid down at the turn of the twentieth century by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorized that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields. In an ideal Paretan economy, jobs would be ever more finely subdivided to allow for the accumulation of complex skills, which would then be traded among workers.But however great the economic advantages of segmenting the elements of an afternoon’s work into a range of forty-year-long careers, there was reason to wonder about the unintended side effects of doing so. In particular, one felt tempted to askhow meaningful the lives might feel as a result.

— Alain de Botton knowledge

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