Quotes by Alain de Botton

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us."
743 likes

"Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them."
488 likes

"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."
466 likes

"One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy."
438 likes

"Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species."
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Books by Alain de Botton

  • The Course of Love
  • 29,452 ratings
  • April 28th 2016 by Hamish Hamilton

    (first published March 2016)

  • On Love
  • 24,520 ratings
  • January 6th 2006 by Grove Press

    (first published November 1993)

  • The Art of Travel
  • 20,884 ratings
  • May 11th 2004 by Vintage

    (first published May 2nd 2002)

  • Status Anxiety
  • 14,297 ratings
  • May 10th 2005 by Vintage

    (first published 2004)

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Alain de Botton
  • Alain de Botton

  • Born: in Zurich, Switzerland.

  • Description: Alain de Botton is a writer and television producer who lives in London and aims to make philosophy relevant to everyday life. He can be contacted by email directly via www.alaindebotton.com He is a writer of essayistic books, which refer both to his own experiences and ideas- and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. It's a style of writing that has been termed a 'philosophy of everyday life.'His first book, Essays in Love [titled On Love in the US], minutely analysed the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book was unusual, because it mixed elements of a novel together with reflections and analyses normally found in a piece of non-fiction. It's a book of which many readers are still fondest.Bibliography:* Essays In Love (1993)* The Romantic Movement (1994)* Kiss and Tell (1995)* How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)* The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)* The Art of Travel (2002)* Status Anxiety (2004)* The Architecture of Happiness (2006)* The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009)

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