The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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Alain de Botton
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
The most boring and unproductive question one can ask of any religion is whether or not it is true.
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
To cope with the conflict between hope and reality, our culture should teach us good integration skills, prompting us to accept with a little more grace what is imperfect in ourselves – and then, by extension, in others. We should be gently reminded that no one we can love will ever satisfy us…
It’s a huge psychological achievement to accept other humans in their bewildering mixture of good and bad, capacity to assist us and to frustrate us, kindness and meanness – and to see that, far more than we’re inclined to imagine in our furious or ecstatic moments, most people belong in that…
By understanding and analyzing our feelings, we learn to see how emotions impact on our behavior in unexpected, counterintuitive and sometimes dangerous ways. Philosophers were the first therapists.
You could perhaps say ‘happiness’ but ‘happiness’ is misleading, for it suggests continuous chirpiness and joy, whereas ‘fulfillment’ seems compatible with a lot of pain and suffering, which every decent life must by necessity have.
One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that’s ok with them.
As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
It's as important to know how to give up on dreams/ambitions as it is to know how to generate them.
One of the most astonishing human traits: our ability to keeping getting up, lugging ourselves around and doing our stuff day after day.
One of the great recipes for a certain kind of happiness: a marked reluctance to imagine other people might deeply dislike you.
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Of many books, one feels, 'it could have been truly good, if the author's appetite for suffering had been greater.'
Writing a book is like telling a joke and having to wait 2 years to know whether or not it was funny.