Alain de Botton Quotes

I wanted to be like my friends. I hung out with girls who had blue eyes and blond hair and I thought, 'I want to look like them!'

Like every girl, I felt amazing pressure to look like the popular girls, but no one told me the popular girls were all air brushed in magazines.

It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.

We're always bombarded with images from magazines of what looks cool and sexy.

The American dream, what we were taught was, grow up, own a car, own a house. I think that dream's completely changing. We were taught to keep up with the Joneses. Now we're sharing with the Joneses.

People are obsessed with actresses being hairless, fatless Barbie dolls.

So many of the kids on television have really nice clothes, perfect skin and hair.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Women today are bombarded with so many messages, like we should have Naomi Campbell's body and Madeleine Albright's career.

You don't want to be that parent - the one who dresses his kid in a cloth sack when all the other kids are in Armani cloth sacks - especially in a time like ours, when materialism is not only rampant and ascendant but is fast becoming the only game in town.

I was always a little insecure. I had brothers that played football, so I was just a straight-up tomboy for a minute. I didn't know makeup and hair stuff. My friends had to tell me what a straightener was. I didn't know fashion or any of that until the label gave me a stylist.

We're teaching young girls that this is what they should be focusing on: rich and famous girls who are rich and famous for nothing.

If you look at the footballers, you look at our celebrity culture, we seem to be saying, 'This is the way you want to be'. We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people.

I won't allow magazines in the house. When I was younger, I wanted to have my hair cut like so-and-so in the class above me at school, not somebody in a magazine. You see young girls trying to dress like so-and-so because they've seen lots of pictures of them.

I think sometimes girls look at Victoria's Secret models and think that they have to model themselves after that, but I really don't think that's the best; even though they are called 'models,' they're not the best people to model yourself after.

We were poor. My mother got our clothes out of the free box at the church, you know? So much of when you're a kid is about relating about what you watch on TV. And who's got these cooler shoes, and 'Let's trade lunches.' And I was just like, 'I don't have a television. I have a rock and a piece of tofu.'

We are living in a world where image is important and we feel the need to confirm to a standard of what beauty is and how beauty should look like. We look at the billboard, and feel something is lacking in us.

In private school, I definitely judged myself against the lighter-skinned girls. I wanted to have different hair. I wanted to fit in. I thought that was more beautiful.

People's opinions outside of my direct group of friends means next to nothing.

That's mind-blowing to me that people would say that because you have nice things, you're soft. No, you're soft because your culture is soft.

It's becoming increasingly difficult to find kids to hang out with that don't consume a lot of commercial culture.

My dad, bless his heart, always told me I was beautiful, so I was never self-conscious in that way. But when you look at the images on TV, you think you need to look like that in order to be sexy.

Social media provides a constant platform on which to feature what we deem beautiful, meaningful, and worthy.

I wanted to be Barbie.

It's insidious how Hollywood warps your values without you even realizing that it's happening to you. You get a little whiff of success and it whets your appetite, and before you know it you're going right down the road they've laid out for you.