Limited Time Offer
Premium members can get their quote collection automatically imported into their Quotosaurus collections.
“ ”To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
About Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton (born 20 December 1969) is a Swiss-born British philosopher and author. His books and television programs discuss various contemporary subjects and themes in a philosophical style, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. De Botton comes from a Sephardic Jewish family, originating from a small Castilian town of Boton (now vanished) on the Iberian peninsula.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Additional quotes by Alain de Botton
Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom
we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during
long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is
gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the
beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation
about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or
blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.
There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative.