Alain de Botton Quotes

In addition to the research, I enjoyed learning French and assimilating the culture of another country.

Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly romantic, love is the key element. I really love to play with different musicians who come from different cultural backgrounds.

I would love to study cultures and people.

I now talk to different cultures, and I hope that I can bridge those gaps and differences between us. It's an adventure, a dream... I feel like I'm on an anthropological mission.

Culture is this thing that we can exchange among ourselves as human beings to knock aside our differences and build upon our similarities. Cultural exchange is the ultimate exchange.

Culture means the perfect and equal development of man on all sides.

I serve like a bridge. I go to other cultures, learn, put myself in different situations and learn as much as I can, and then go to Western cultures to give. I'm doing this bridging all the time.

American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.

I understand culture. I am the nucleus.

People have compact to go beyond our own culture and upbringing to a degree that I think we don't acknowledge enough really.

Foreign culture is as necessary to the spirit of a nation as is foreign commerce to its industries.

People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.

Love is the outreach of self toward completion.

The grandest ambition that any man can possibly have is to so live and so improve himself in heart and brain as to be worthy of the love of some splendid woman; and the grandest ambition of any girl is to make herself worthy of the love and adoration of some magnificent man.

When I was married, I wasn't loving myself. Now I'm in love with myself. I will get married again.

The two cultures of East and West are very different, and the priorities are very different. So when you understand that - if you are from this side or this side - when you understand that the other is different than you, and you respect these differences, you can build communication.

If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture. It's a form of aggression.

I love having different cultures around, but when the parent culture kind of dissipates, you're left thinking, 'Well, what's going on?'

I would love to take a cooking class from Gandhi. Maybe I could teach him how to cook, and he could teach me his message. I wouldn't mind learning how to make couscous from scratch from a North African woman, either.

I've never been in any country for more than four years, and I'm learning different languages all the time. It gives you a different attitude.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

I think a lot of the time having someone who you, not base yourself on, but can see yourself being after a few years, you can get quite blinded by that, in the same way love can be.