Alain de Botton Quotes

If you're willing to put two thoughts into a picture then you're already ahead of the game.

I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.

Posing good questions is harder than it might seem... It's hard because asking good questions requires you to see past the easy answers and to focus instead on the difficult, the tricky, the mysterious, the awkward, and sometimes the painful. ... Great leaders don't have all the answers, but they know how to ask the right questions - questions that force others and themselves to move past old and tired answers, questions that open up possibilities that, before the question, went unseen.

You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge.

In mathematics and science we solve our problems as well as create them. But in art and philosophy things are not so simple.

Nothing, believe me, nothing is more satisfying to me personally than getting a great idea and then beatin' it to death.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.

Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society . . . but for me and no one else, education means making creators. . . . You have to make inventors, innovators...not conformists

Possibilities play a much bigger role in thinking than most people believe. Without possibilities you cannot make progress.

Whether or not science can be applied to that mental construct [i.e. the designed entity] is a matter of availability. If there is body of scientific knowledge that can be applied, then it would be foolish not to exploit it. However, if there is none, it does not mean that the thing cannot be designed, made, and used safely.

To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.

The heartbeat of your originality is deep within a body of thought that continually wrestles with the contradictions and limitations that we're constantly trying to overcome, the curiosities and the ignorances of the people we seek to help.

I believe more than ever, machines will put new challenges, and that means we'll have to be more creative and more human, because that's the way to make the difference.

To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.

I get my by any means on, whenever there's a drought get your umbrellas out because that's when I brainstorm.

If you can't solve a problem, it's because you're playing by the rules

It's not the ink, it's the think.

I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.

Sheer necessity,-the proper parent of an art so nearly allied to invention.

To launch a business means successfully solving problems. Solving problems means listening.

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored.

Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: Take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.

Creativity is the process that gives life to a new product.

I always thought problem solving was greatly overrated - and that the most important thing was problem creation.

Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.