Quotes About Alain de Botton

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.

Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval. That

But reassurance can be the cruelest antidote to anxiety. Our rosy predictions both leave the anxious unprepared for the worst.

Human beings sometimes interest me but I don't like them because they are not intelligent enough.

The continuing belief that the world is fundamentally just is implied in the very complaint that there has been an injustice.

However, the immediacy with which aesthetic judgments arise should not fool us into assuming that their origins are entirely natural or their verdicts unalterable.

The only way to defend language is to attack it....' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

It is surprising to find that Proust held some extremely caustic views about friendship- in fact, to find that he had an unusually limited conception of the value of his, or indeed anyone's friendships.

The nature of this particular daydream is foreign, unfamiliar and frankly not a little disgusting to me, but I'm interested in hearing about it nonetheless, because more critical than my relative comfort is my ability to cope with who you are.

painless thoughts...and painful thoughts...there are two methods by which a person can acquire wisdom, and he proposes that the painful variety is the far superior

Objects mimic in material dimension what we require in a psychological one

The distinctive mark of snobs is not simple discrimination, it is an insistence on a flawless equation between social rank and human worth.

we shouldn't be surprised if this kind of stoicism is of no interest whatsoever to the news, for it has sound commercial incentives for overemphasizing our vulnerability.

Art compensates us for certain inborn weaknesses, in this case of the mind rather than the body, weaknesses that we can refer to as psychological frailties

Alain de Botton has written a book called How Proust Can Change Your Life, a title that I suspect was devised with at least some tongue in cheek but that speaks, nonetheless, to a very real possibility of personal transformation. The title of this book is in a way lighthearted homage to de Botton's remarkable book.

In 1997, Alain de Botton published his book 'How Proust Can Change Your Life.' I was charmed by it. I remember using it in a course on cultural criticism for a graduate class that had a mix of theorists and creative writers.

Most of the time, we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us; therefore, we are not likely to be forgiving or sympathetic.

Writing isn't a career choice. It's self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

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

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

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.

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

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.

Peter Drucker and his book The Effective Executive, as well as Alain de Botton's (page 486) How Proust Can Change Your Life.