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cestsimona 's review for:
The School of Life: An Emotional Education
by Alain de Botton
I definitely think everybody should read it, preferrably at a younger age. I see this book adding heaps of value to the life of a 15 year-old; the use in your late twenties is more limited, as you will have chewed through more or most of those ideas already by then, depending on where you are in life.
I thoroughly enjoyed the section on politeness vs. frankness and the different world views that are carried behind these traits, a section that is worth reading in total and cannot be summed up in a review.
Beautiful use of language by the way! If you are a non-native, this book is a big asset in learning how to speak well.
Some of my favorite quotes:
"The point of art was [...] to nudge our recalcitrant minds towards accepting ideas that we might nod along to but then ignore if they were not stated in especially varnished and graceful terms. Christianity, for example, devoted so much attention to art (architecture, music, paining, etc.) not because it cared for beauty per se, but because it understood the power of beauty to persuade us into particular patterns of thought [...]."
On delivering bad news: "But true niceness does not mean seeming nice, it means helping the people we are going to disappoint to adjust as best they can to reality. By administering a sharp, clean blow, the diplomatic person kills off the torture of hope, accepting the frustration that is likely to come their way: the diplomat is kind enough to let themselves sometimes be the target of hate."
"[...] The weakness of strength: This dictates that we should interpret people's weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points."
"We don't fall in love first and foremost with those who care for us best and most devotedly; we fall in love with those who care for us in ways that we expect. [...] Far more than happiness, what motivates us in relationships is a search for familiarity."
"Two people should see a relationship as a constant opportunity to improve and be improved."
"When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: we are failing to see that our partner, home and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well."
"We start to behave across our whole lives like the people work has required us to be in our productive hours. Along the way, this narrows character."
"In their way, religions addressed a universal problem: they recognized the powerful need to be intimately known and appreciated and admitted frankly that this need could not realistically ever be met by other people. What replaced religion in our imaginations [...] is the cult of human-to-human love we now know as Romanticism, which bequeathed to us the beautiful but reckless idea that loneliness might be capable of being vanquished, if we are fortunate and determined enough to meet the one exalted being known as our soulmate, someone who will understand everything deep and strange about us, who will see us completely and be enchanted by our totality. But the legacy of Romanticism has been an epidemic of loneliness, as we are repeatedly brought up against the truth: the radical inability of any one other person to wholly grasp who we truly are."
I thoroughly enjoyed the section on politeness vs. frankness and the different world views that are carried behind these traits, a section that is worth reading in total and cannot be summed up in a review.
Beautiful use of language by the way! If you are a non-native, this book is a big asset in learning how to speak well.
Some of my favorite quotes:
"The point of art was [...] to nudge our recalcitrant minds towards accepting ideas that we might nod along to but then ignore if they were not stated in especially varnished and graceful terms. Christianity, for example, devoted so much attention to art (architecture, music, paining, etc.) not because it cared for beauty per se, but because it understood the power of beauty to persuade us into particular patterns of thought [...]."
On delivering bad news: "But true niceness does not mean seeming nice, it means helping the people we are going to disappoint to adjust as best they can to reality. By administering a sharp, clean blow, the diplomatic person kills off the torture of hope, accepting the frustration that is likely to come their way: the diplomat is kind enough to let themselves sometimes be the target of hate."
"[...] The weakness of strength: This dictates that we should interpret people's weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points."
"We don't fall in love first and foremost with those who care for us best and most devotedly; we fall in love with those who care for us in ways that we expect. [...] Far more than happiness, what motivates us in relationships is a search for familiarity."
"Two people should see a relationship as a constant opportunity to improve and be improved."
"When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: we are failing to see that our partner, home and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well."
"We start to behave across our whole lives like the people work has required us to be in our productive hours. Along the way, this narrows character."
"In their way, religions addressed a universal problem: they recognized the powerful need to be intimately known and appreciated and admitted frankly that this need could not realistically ever be met by other people. What replaced religion in our imaginations [...] is the cult of human-to-human love we now know as Romanticism, which bequeathed to us the beautiful but reckless idea that loneliness might be capable of being vanquished, if we are fortunate and determined enough to meet the one exalted being known as our soulmate, someone who will understand everything deep and strange about us, who will see us completely and be enchanted by our totality. But the legacy of Romanticism has been an epidemic of loneliness, as we are repeatedly brought up against the truth: the radical inability of any one other person to wholly grasp who we truly are."