Alain de Botton Quotes About Failing

Quotes about: Failing

• 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

  Pain, Thinking, Suffering

  Alain De Botton (1997). “How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel”, Pantheon

• To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

  Alain de Botton

  Love Is, Views, Names

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.6, Vintage

• Status Anxiety: A worry, so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.

  Alain de Botton

  Happiness, Success, Fall

• The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

  Alain de Botton

  Desire, Stronger, Comfort

  Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.250, Vintage

• William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

  Alain de Botton

  Pride, Expectations, Achievement

• The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

  Alain de Botton

  Looks, May, Proust

  Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.153, Pan Macmillan

• We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

  Alain de Botton

  Justice, Phrases, Definitions

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