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
Alain de Botton explores how we can cope with a variety of forms of mental pain and illness, from the mild to the severe. It considers how and why we might become ill; how we can explain things to friends, family and colleagues; how we can find our ways towards recovery; and how we...
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...
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,...
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;...
- Anthropologists tell us that the group always comes before the individual, that to understand the latter one must pass through the former, be it nation, tribe, clan, or family. Love or Liberalism - I care about you, therefore I will upset you, I hav honored you with a vision of how...
Mr. de Botton’s book could have been accurately titled “Living for the Moment the Marcel Proust Way.” Seen in this light, “A la Recherche du Temps Perdu” is a very unusual self-help book. As Mr. de Botton explains, Marcel Proust’s family was into self-help long before there wa...
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 ...
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...
the eighteenth century bourgeoisie yoked together what was pleasurable and what was necessary. They argued that there was no inherent conflict between sexual passion and the practical demands of raising children in a family unit, and that there could hence be romance within a marriage – just as...