Quote

We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.

Alain de Botton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Thinking
Suffering
Learn
Pain
Hoped
Problem
Fails
Anything
Properly
Something
Suffer
Really
Therefore
Think
Failing

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
Alain de Botton
Image
These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
Alain de Botton
Image
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Alain de Botton
Image
I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
Alain de Botton
Image
...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
Alain de Botton
Image
The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
Alain de Botton
Image
The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
Alain de Botton
Image
In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
Alain de Botton
Image
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
Alain de Botton
Image
Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
Image
We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
Alain de Botton
Image
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Alain de Botton
Image
The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
Alain de Botton
Image
I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Alain de Botton
Image
Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
Alain de Botton
Image
Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
Alain de Botton
Image
A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain de Botton
Image
He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
Alain de Botton
Image
Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
Alain de Botton
Image
I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
Alain de Botton