Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969. His father, at the time, was the wealthy co-founder of the organization, ‘Global Asset Management’. He has a step-sister, Miel. Alain de Botton is the ingenious English and Swiss author. He authored his first best-seller novel, ‘Essays in Love’ in 1993. Over 2 million copies of Essays in Love were sold. In January 2012, de Botton published Religion for Atheists, about the benefits of religions for those who do not believe in them. De Botton has described his relationship with his father as difficult, Alain was made the Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, for his contributions to architecture, in 2009. In 2011, he was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Here are best Alain de Botton Quotes and Sayings.
Alain de Botton Quotes
- “There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.”
- “You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.”
- “There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.”
- “Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.”
- “One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: ‘This too shall pass.’”
- “Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”
- “There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.”
- “Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.”
- “Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.”
- “If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.”
- “A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.”
- “The sole cause of a man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
- “Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.”
- “It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value.”
- “Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.”
- “To appreciate life’s small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect.”
- “As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.”
- “Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.”
- “Adulthood involves learning to conclusively bury a great many of our hopes.”
- “Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.”
- “Being snappy is a symptom of an argument we forgot to have some way back.”
- “If you wish to put off all worry, assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen.”
- “Importance of the random: keep brushing up against people, books, experiences we don’t yet know what to do with.”
- “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
- “How we feel about ‘the nature of existence’ is largely determined by what we have to do in the next few hours.”
- “Insomnia is his mind’s revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.”
- “The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray.”
- “Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.”
- “We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired.”
- “It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.”
- “It is easy to get upset about the deteriorating state of one’s body, but there are other ways to excel and impress than via one’s legs.”
- “Work begins when the fear of doing nothing at all finally trumps the terror of doing it badly.”
- “What we find beautiful and what we see as attractive are indicators of what we crave in order to become properly ‘whole’.”
- “The whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer.”
- “Not everything which makes us feel better is good for us. Not everything which hurts may be bad.”
- “Rather than struggling to become bigger fish, we might concentrate our energies on finding smaller ponds or smaller species to swim with, so our own size will trouble us less.”
- “If you want to turn a stranger into a friend, try telling them some of the ways in which you’ve failed.”
- “Anxiety is insight that we haven’t yet found a productive use for.”
- “The constant challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.”
- “It takes a serious lack of imagination to have an entirely clean conscience.”
- “We mostly lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; but with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.”
- “You have to feel quite out of control in order to get controlling.”
- “Hypochondria: an above-average imagination applied to the deeply improbable nature of being alive.”
- “The difference between bitterness, confusion, nostalgia – and resilience is… a plan.”
- “Change begins when the fear of not acting at all at last outstrips the paralysing fear of making a mistake.”
- “For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.”
- “The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.”
- “Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.”
- “A good half of the art of living is resilience.”
- “Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.”
- “One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”
- “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.”
- “The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”
- “It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”
- “To one’s enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.”
- “Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.”
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- “The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.”
“One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.”
“We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.”
“It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.”
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition. - Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.
- I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
- Travel is a lot like love.
- If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.
- One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively.
