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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
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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Think
Failing
Thinking
Suffering
Learn
Pain
Hoped
Problem
Fails
Anything
Properly
Something
Suffer
Really
Therefore
More quotes by Alain de Botton
We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
Alain de Botton
You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
Alain de Botton
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
Alain de Botton
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
Alain de Botton
It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
Alain de Botton
When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
Alain de Botton
It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
Alain de Botton
Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
Alain de Botton
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
Alain de Botton
It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
Alain de Botton
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Alain de Botton
Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Alain de Botton
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Alain de Botton
Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Alain de Botton
Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
Alain de Botton
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
Alain de Botton
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
Alain de Botton
What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Alain de Botton
