Quote

A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

Alain de Botton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Matter
Great
Attuned
Things
Radar
Like
Picks
Significant
Writer
Almost
Moments

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
Alain de Botton
Image
It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
Alain de Botton
Image
You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
Alain de Botton
Image
We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
Alain de Botton
Image
If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
Alain de Botton
Image
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
Image
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.
Alain de Botton
Image
I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
Alain de Botton
Image
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.
Alain de Botton
Image
...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
Alain de Botton
Image
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
Alain de Botton
Image
I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
Alain de Botton
Image
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
Image
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
Alain de Botton
Image
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
Alain de Botton
Image
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Alain de Botton
Image
We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain de Botton
Image
Must being in love always mean being in pain?
Alain de Botton
Image
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
Alain de Botton