Quote

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

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
Sense
Going
Much
Really
World
Humiliation
Gets
Serious
Trouble

More quotes by Alain de Botton

Image
The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton
Image
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton
Image
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Alain de Botton
Image
Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
Alain de Botton
Image
Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Alain de Botton
Image
Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
Alain de Botton
Image
I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
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
The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
Alain de Botton
Image
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain de Botton
Image
There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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
Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
Alain de Botton
Image
It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
Alain de Botton
Image
The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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
Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
Alain de Botton
Image
Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
Alain de Botton