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Alain de Botton

Writer
1
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What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
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 respectability.
From Status Anxiety
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Hope
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.
From The Course of Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
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.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Hope
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
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 majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.
From Status Anxiety
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
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 respectability.
From Status Anxiety
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Hope
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.
From The Course of Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
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.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Hope
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
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 majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.
From Status Anxiety
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
...workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Education
For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations....

Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
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 respectability.
From Status Anxiety
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Hope
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Happiness
You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?
From The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Death
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.
From The Course of Love
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Relationships
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Religion
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.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Philosophical
It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces.
From Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Hope
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
A good half of the art of living is resilience.
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Life
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 majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.
From Status Anxiety
NOT YET RATING ▼
Topic: Success
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