De Botton is the son of a fabulously wealthy Swiss financier, has never worked in a factory or shop in his life, and only briefly worked in an office, part-time, when he was making TV documentaries. So when he remarks playfully - playfully being his default setting - that a lot of th...
his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity,...
Of course, De Botton doesn’t claim to hold all the answers; as in previous books, he turns to old masters of art and literature for wisdom and guidance: Baudelaire, Flaubert, Hopper and Van Gogh, among others. He quotes Flaubert on his notorious (and hilarious) contempt for France, and...
De Botton starts with a dithyramb to the pleasures of a west London suburban house, his own, one suspects. It is all about the accidental pleasures of sunlight and silence, the associations of family life and the recollections of those who might have lived in the house before; not about th...
family––it's that sort of extremity that helpfully reminds us that there are all sorts of things that have claims on us, family life, political life, etc. And that a well-ordered life means sorting these in at the right moment. But to say that beauty has no claim on us is also ...
BY ALAIN DE BOTTON The greatest share of the art that humans have ever made for one another has had one thing in common: it has dealt, in one form or another, with sorrow. Unhappy love, poverty, discrimination, anxiety, sexual humiliation, rivalry, regret, shame, isolation and longing;...
When, in AD 65, Seneca was ordered to kill himself by the crazed Emperor Nero, his wife and family collapsed in tears, but Seneca had learnt to follow the charriot of life with resignation. As he calmly took the knife to his veins, he remarked – in a sentence we may be wise to ...
aAs argued in his 2004 book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton correctly emphasizes humorists as vital to society for their ability to act as society’s Hermes, delivering messages without. 如被争论在他的2004本书状态忧虑, Alain ・ de Botton正确地强调幽默作家一样重要对社会为他们的行动能力象社会...
s Hermes, delivering messages without. Humor’s importance has manifested itself in political cartoons of Revolutionary France, Mark Twin’ s satire of southern racism and hypo 如被争论在他的2004本书状态忧虑, Alain ・ de Botton正确地强调幽默作家一样重要对社会为他们的行动能力象社会的Hermes,提供...
January tends to be a time when we resolve to be a better version of ourselves. We make goals, we hustle and work hard at them for a while, but all too often we feel as though we fail when our motivation starts to disappear. But what if we saw each day as an opportunity to learn...