Thoughts 

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Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and now lives in London. He is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.'  He’s written on love, travel, architecture and literature. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries.  At 23, he published Essays In Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004) and The Architecture Of Happiness (2006). In August 2008, he was a founding member of a new educational establishment in central London called The School of Life.

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 In May 2009, he was a founding member of a new architectural organization called "Living Architecture". In October that year, de Botton was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in recognition of his services to architecture. In 2011, de Botton was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

What follows is a collection of thoughts presented on video.  Just click on the pic and enjoy...

Quite literally, the term "philosophy" means, "love of wisdom." In a broad sense, philosophy is an activity people undertake when they seek to understand fundamental truths about themselves, the world in which they live, and their relationships to the world and to each other. As an academic discipline philosophy is much the same. Those who study philosophy are perpetually engaged in asking, answering, and arguing for their answers to life’s most basic questions.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, poet, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on Western philosophy and modern intellectual history. Beginning his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy, he became the youngest-ever occupant of the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869, at age 24. He resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and he completed much of his core writing in the following decade.  In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and a complete loss of his mental faculties. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother (until her death in 1897) and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and died in 1900.

Plato was one of the world's earliest and possibly greatest philosophers. He matters because of his devotion to making humanity more fulfilled. 

Montaigne is a brilliant philosopher in part because he accepted how little philosophers understand. Here is a man wise in so far as he knew how rare wisdom really is.

Michel Foucault was a philosophical historian who questioned many of our assumptions about how much better the world is today compared with the past. When he looked at the treatment of the mad, at the medical profession and at sexuality, he didn't see the progress that's routinely assumed. 

This Greek philosopher, one of our favourites, spent his life arriving at fascinating answers to the largest puzzle there is: What makes people happy?

How the Stoics can help us tackle anxiety, fury and loss of perspective - and realise that very little is needed to make a happy life.