Top 496 Quotes & Sayings by Alain de Botton - Page 2

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

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

The idea of a book that can make a change to your life, that can affect your perspective, is a beautiful and great ambition: one that Seneca, Nietzsche and Tolstoy would have sympathised with.

There are few more effective ways to promote tolerance between suspicious neighbours than to force them to eat supper together.

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.

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

We must study love the way we study anything else that matters.

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.

I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

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.

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

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

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

Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good doing bad and it's nice to help someone.

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.

When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

Among adults, we can admit that of course, characters are creations. They aren't real people.

Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling us potted plants and pizzas while the thinkers are a little bit unworldly. Religions both think and do.

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

My office. It's drab and boring but quiet.

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.

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.

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them fully developed in someone else.

If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what one might as well, and with no supernatural associations whatsoever, call our souls.

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

Katie Price is no exception. She, too, is - in a distinctive way - a philosopher. Partially, Katie Price's philosophy is one of extraordinary confidence. She is remarkable not for her looks or antics but because of her tremendous self-assurance and her unwillingness to be intimidated by criticism or failure.

The idea that one might use art for 'instrumental' reasons tends to set off alarm bells at the heart of the cultural elite, who contend that it's not a pill, that it shouldn't be asked to perform some specific function, especially something as egocentric as to 'cheer you up' or to 'make you a more empathetic person.'

I was an incredibly lonely, very alienated teenager.

One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.

I don't want to say that our expectations of love are too high; it's just that if we're to meet them, we have to become a little more self-aware.

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

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.

There's a certain kind of insular, old-fashioned, upper-class Britishness that gives me the spooks. I am sure that comes from a boarding-school trauma.

I am always anxious.

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

I always feel that I am writing for somebody who is bright but impatient. Someone who doesn't have unlimited time. That is my sense of the reader. So I have got to get to the point.

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.

I think I have grown impatient with just being a writer.

A gray V-neck pullover from Gap. I have 30 of them.

I remember going to university, and the people who'd left home for the first time looked at the food and were horrified. Whereas, my view was that if it was vaguely edible, then it's fine.

Le Corbusier is an outstanding writer. His ideas achieved their impact in large measure because he could write so convincingly. His style is utterly clear, brusque, funny and polemical in the best way.

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.

When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

Many people in the intellectual elite are very scared of shouting. They insist on very quiet murmurs.

Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.

When I'm writing, I write all day. Other days, I sit around thinking. Or I run around from one meeting to another, out in the world. It varies, and I like that.

Many of our ideas of what love is comes from stories... these are extremely powerful shapers of our attitudes towards love, and I think that, in some ways, often we've got the wrong story.

I've had my successes and failures. I know many academics in my field loathe me. I've come to loathe them back, as it seems only polite to do so. But at heart it's absurd; we should band together against the big common enemies.

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

It's easy to forget how little strategic thinking ever gets done in the day. Judging by the ideas generated there, our beds have more of a right to be called our offices than our offices.

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.

There is militaristic-hegemonic-plutocratic side of the U.S. which is getting out of hand and threatens to corrupt the whole republic. I remain a deeply concerned, committed admirer, but also a very worried one.

Emotional life is - alongside work - one of the great challenges of existence and is a theme that I keep returning to.

At 'The School of Life', we take seriously anything that has to do with human fulfilment - and take note wherever insight on this subject can be found.

Atheism is having a heyday in the born-again United States.

I'm one of those introverted people who simply feels a lot better after spending time alone thinking through ideas and emotions. This is a sign, I've come to think, of a kind of emotional disturbance - a reaction to inner fragility. I wish I were more able to just act and do, rather than constantly have to retreat and examine and think.

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'