Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, what kind of suffering is least bad for you?
The audience just looked absolutely stunned.
This is California where they expect an answer, you know, and we are...
Very, you know, we're an age nowadays that wants the complete package.
And I think, you know, the UK hasn't produced much good of late, but one of its chief good exports is melancholy.
And I think that sometimes in love, there is no answer but a kind of melancholy, which is different from bitterness or rage or fury.
It is the incompatibility of life.
well handled, handled with dignity.
And I think that society really doesn't help us in this area.
It constantly excites us to expect total fulfillment across the board.
Yes, I think it is a profound attempt by one person to understand another and vice versa.
But also, and you put your nail on the head, compassion is absolutely key because, you know, a lot of what goes wrong in relationships is self-righteousness, bitterness, a sense that you're okay.
you've done the right things, but it's your partner that's to blame.
And I think that the relationships that go well, and this is eventually what happens to the couple in my novel, is that they learn to forgive one another, which sounds so weird because we've heard it from church pulpits, etc.
But what does that really mean?
It really means being aware of one's own imperfections.
I say at one point that in a better world than ours, lovers on a first date, one of the first things they should say to one another is, so how are you crazy?
And they would each see that question as not necessarily...
pejorative one or an insulting one it's like everybody should be on top of their eccentricities and difficulties and see the ways in which they damage others and you know the best wedding present you could ever give anyone is a sort of 150 page manual called why I'm difficult to live with the most dangerous people are those who think that they're easy to live with because they're going to be you know we don't need people to be perfect
But we need people to have a grasp on their imperfections and to be able to explain as far as they can the nature of these imperfections before we've been hurt too badly by them.
Showing 341–360 of 1,037 · page 18 of 52
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