Authors:
  1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. A
  4. Alain de Botton
  5. Achievement

Alain de Botton Quotes about Achievement

All Alain de Botton Quotes Achievement quotes Age Ambition Anxiety Art Atheist Awareness Belief Bitterness Blame Challenges Children Choices Curiosity Desire Destiny Difficulty Dignity Envy Expectations Falling In Love Feelings Frustration Giving Giving Up God Gratitude Happiness Hate Heart Home Identity Inspiration Journey Joy Literature Losing Love Lying Memories Motivation Optimism Pain Painting Personality Perspective Philosophy Proust Purpose Quality Reality Sadness Soul Suffering Travel Understanding Weakness Worry Writing
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Alain de Botton
Achievement, Ordinary, Enough
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, Chapter IV, Consolation For Inadequacy, 2000.

Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

Alain de Botton
Achievement, Doe, Affection
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.77, 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

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

Alain de Botton
Achievement, Challenges, Ruins
Alain de Botton (2009). “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”, p.218, Penguin UK

You May Also Like: