Alain de Botton Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Alain de Botton:

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition.

Alain de Botton

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

Alain de Botton

If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days.

Alain de Botton

I believe that art is a tool and that, like all tools, it has functions. I also think it is important to know what the tool is for so that we can better know how and when to use it.

Alain de Botton

If you're understood in maybe, I don't know, 60% of your soul by your partner, that's fantastic. Don't expect that it's going to be 100%. Of course you will be lonely.

Alain de Botton

Everyone's more vulnerable than they seem, and I think men are more vulnerable. Once you get close to a man, the whole thing's a facade anyway. I think manhood is fragile.

Alain de Botton

The problem with airports is that we go there when we need to catch a plane - and because it's so difficult to find the way to the gate, we tend not to look around at our surroundings.

Alain de Botton

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

Alain de Botton

Love is something that we need to learn.

Alain de Botton

Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.

Alain de Botton

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

Alain de Botton

My office. It's drab and boring but quiet.

Alain de Botton

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

Alain de Botton

When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

Alain de Botton

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

Alain de Botton

I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

Alain de Botton

I waste most of the day, then finally start to write around 3 P.M., totally disgusted with myself for my wasteful nature.

Alain de Botton

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

Alain de Botton

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

Alain de Botton

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

Alain de Botton

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

Alain de Botton

I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

Alain de Botton

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

Alain de Botton

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

Alain de Botton

I love novels where not much 'happens' but where the interest is in the ideas and analyses of characters.

Alain de Botton

What I do know from my life is the phenomenon of saying, 'This is too small a thing to argue about', but then nevertheless finding oneself in that argument.

Alain de Botton

The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is that we find lovely in them - the visions of friendship, togetherness, repose, or whatever. And then consider what would actually help us find these qualities in our lives.

Alain de Botton

I was a very un-literary child, which might reassure parents with kids who don't read.

Alain de Botton

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.

Alain de Botton

We have to put aside the customary historical reading of works of art in order to invite art to respond to certain quite specific pains and dilemmas of our psyches.

Alain de Botton

Some of the reason why we marry the wrong people is that we don't really understand ourselves.

Alain de Botton

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

Alain de Botton

One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself.

Alain de Botton

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

Alain de Botton

I am a very aesthetic person.

Alain de Botton

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

Alain de Botton