Alain de Botton Quotes, Atheist Quotes, Giving Up Quotes

I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

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One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Danger Quotes

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes

We don't exist unless there is someone who can see us existing, what we say has no meaning until someone can understand, while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness. In small comments, many of them teasing, they reveal they know our foibles and except them and so, in turn, accept that we have a place in the world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Numbness Quotes , Identity Quotes

One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.

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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sadness Quotes , Feelings Quotes

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.

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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , Princess Quotes

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Heart Quotes , Ideas Quotes

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.

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

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For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hate Quotes , Thinking Quotes

According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , Men Quotes