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Alain de Botton

106 quotesWriter · Born Dec 20, 1969 · Swiss And British · Male

Alain de Botton, FRSL (/dəˈbɒtən/; born 20 December 1969) is a Swiss-born British author. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004) and The Architecture of Happiness (2006). He co-founded The School of Life in 2008 and Living Architecture in 2009. In 2015, he was awarded "The Fellowship of Schopenhauer", an annual writers award from the Melbourne Writers Festival, for this work. 2Early life and family de Botton was born in Zurich, the son of Jacqueline (née Burgauer) and Gilbert de Botton, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and expelled (along with the rest of the Jewish community) under Nasser. Gilbert went to live and work in Switzerland, where he co-founded an investment firm, Global Asset Management; his family was estimated to have been worth £234 million in 1999. De Botton's Swiss-born mother was Ashkenazi, and his father was from a Sephardic Jewish family from the town of Boton in Castile and León. De Botton's ancestors include Abraham de Boto

All Love (52)Marriage (29)Truth About Love (19)The Truth About Love (14)Defining Love (14)soulmates (10)Philosophy (10)Soul Mate (10)Soul Mates (7)This Is Love (7)True Love (7)Relationship (6)Intimacy (6)The Person You'll Become (5)Relationships (5)

From “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person”

Embrace a philosophy of pessimism. Every human will disappoint you, and you'll do the same to them.

Marriage Human Relationships Bad Friendship Real Friendship

From “The Course of Love: A Novel”

We don’t need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

Relationship Love Sanity

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.

Marriage Love Relationship Future

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them.

Intimacy Relationship Cute Love

By the standards of most love stories, our own, real relationships are almost all damaged and unsatisfactory. No wonder separation and divorce so often appear inevitable. But we should be careful not to judge our relationships by the expectations imposed on us by a frequently misleading aesthetic…

The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why in so many love stories there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a…

It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.

Never having been betrayed sets up poor preconditions for remaining faithful. Evolving into genuinely more loyal people requires us to suffer through some properly innoculative episodes, in which we feel for a time limitlessly panicked, violated and on the edge of collapse. Only then can the…

From “In Praise of the Quiet Life”

Yet, when we examine matters closely, busy lives turn out to have certain strikingly high incidental costs that we are nevertheless collectively committed to ignoring. Visible success brings us up against the envy and competitiveness of strangers. We become plausible targets for disappointment and…

From “The Difficulty of Being in the Present”

Our minds are cavernous, chaotic places. So much courses through them that has little to do with what is right in front of our eyes. We end up seeming ungrateful to where are. Someone is telling us an important story, and not from any evil, just from the difficulty of having to manage the entity…

Very many of us suffer from a peculiar-sounding problem: an inability to properly inhabit the stretch of time we call ‘the present’. Maybe we’re on a beautiful beach on a sunny day, the sky is azure and the palm trees slender and implausibly delicate, but most of ‘us’ isn’t actually here at all,…

From “Alain de Botton Quote: “A good half of the art of living is resilience.””

A good half of the art of living is resilience.

Bounce Back Resilience Living Art Of Living

From “Twitter”

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Book Love Hooked in a book

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

Childhood Childhood Memories Memories senses Nostalgia

From “The Course of Love”

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the 'right' person.

Love Marriage Soul Mates This Is Love True Love

We speak of 'love' as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural--and dangerous--fixation on the former.

Love Marriage Soul Mates This Is Love True Love

Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions.

Love Truth About Love Sad Truth About Love Failing Love

He is in love with a woman who too often appears not to need love at all; a fighter so capable and strong that there are few opportunities afforded to nurture her.

Love Loving A Strong Woman Strong Women My Favorites Truth About Love

It happens much as he remembers it from before, that first span with someone new. If he could collect every such scene from across his past and put them together on a single loop, the total running time might be no more than half an hour, yet these would in many ways be the finest moments of his…

Love Marriage Soul Mates This Is Love True Love

We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.

Love Marriage The Truth About Love Truth About Love Defining Love

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