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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Value
Interest
Latent
Values
Released
Everything
Layers
Began
Potential
Consider
Objects

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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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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.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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