"The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when its brick walls held the warmth of newly baked bread. It has provided psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, on looking around them, remembered who they were." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness"In medieval Japan, poets and priests directed the Japanese toward cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery, raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves, autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood. A word emerged, wabi, of which no Western language, tellingly, has a direct equivalent, which identified beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished, transient things. There was wabi to be enjoyed in an evening spent alone in a cottage in the woods hearing the rain fall." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
"In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion – and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium. Our innate imbalances are further aggravated by practical demands. Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
"It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames." - Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
"Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not." - Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel
"Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too." - Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety
"All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a penance." - Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
"What makes the prospect of death so distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours." - Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others." - Alain de Botton, On Love
Alain de Botton, Philosophy: Shopenauer on Love
Philosophy: Shopenauer on Love - Part 2 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Shopenauer on Love - Part 3 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Neitzsche on Hardship - Part 1 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Neitzsche on Hardship - Part 2 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Neitzsche on Hardship - Part 3 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Socrates on Self-Confidence - Part 1 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Socrates on Self-Confidence - Part 2 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Socrates on Self-Confidence - Part 3 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Epicurus on Happiness - Part 1 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Epicurus on Happiness - Part 2 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Epicurus on Happiness - Part 3 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Montaigne on Self-Esteem - Part 1 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Montaigne on Self-Esteem - Part 2 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Montaigne on Self-Esteem - Part 3 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Seneca on Anger - Part 1 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Seneca on Anger - Part 2 of 3 (Video)
Philosophy: Seneca on Anger - Part 3 of 3 (Video)
From TED 2009
A Kinder, Gentler Philosophy of Success by Alain de Botton (Video)
From FORA.tv
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton (Video)
From City Journal
The Consolations of Pessimism by Alain de Botton (Essay)
From The Atlantic
The Status-tician by Adam Baer (Interview with Alain de Botton)
From The Guardian
On The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Lynn Barber (Interview with Alain de Botton)
From The Independent
Philosopher King by Katy Guest (Interview with Alain de Botton)
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