Quote

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

Alain de Botton

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Challenge
Challenges
Interesting
Another
Human
Humans

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Alain de Botton
Image
We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
Alain de Botton
Image
We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain de Botton
Image
Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Alain de Botton
Image
Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
Alain de Botton
Image
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
Alain de Botton
Image
Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
Alain de Botton
Image
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
Alain de Botton
Image
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
Image
We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Alain de Botton
Image
People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
Alain de Botton
Image
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
Alain de Botton
Image
Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
Alain de Botton
Image
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton
Image
Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
Image
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
Image
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain de Botton
Image
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
Alain de Botton
Image
Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
Alain de Botton
Image
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