Alain de Bottom is a Swiss born English writer, essayist, novelist, and television presenter, best known for his works such as ‘The Architecture of Happiness’, ‘Status Anxiety’, and ‘The Consolations of Philosophy’. Alain debuted as a writer at the age of 23 with ‘Essays in Love’, which focused on the idea and complications of love and became a best-seller. ‘How Proust Can Change Your Life’ is one of the non-fiction works published by Alain. Alain’s book ‘The Architecture of Happiness’, described the reflection of personality traits on Modernist and vernacular architecture. Alain co-founded an educational and cultural institution ‘The School of Life’ in 2008 in London. His books ‘Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion’ and ‘How to Think More About Sex’ were also well-received by the readers. In 2013, he published ‘Art as Therapy’ that was followed by ‘The News: A User’s Manual’ in 2014. Alain published his latest book ‘The Course of Love’ in 2016. His writings, essays, work and quotations provide insights about love, life, relationships and education system. We have excerpted his quotes and sayings from his writings, interviews, essays and life. Here is a collection of thoughts, sayings and quotes by the sought-after novelist on marriage, happiness, travel and life.
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.
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Alain de Botton
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Alain de Botton
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Alain de Botton
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
Alain de Botton
One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.
Alain de Botton
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
Alain de Botton
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Alain de Botton
We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
Alain de Botton
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Alain de Botton
A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
Alain de Botton
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
Alain de Botton
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Alain de Botton
Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Alain de Botton
Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
Alain de Botton
Not everything which happens to us occurs with reference to something about us.
Alain de Botton
An urgent wish is no guarantor of a sound solution.
Alain de Botton
It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided.
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