Alain de Botton Quotes, Stupid Quotes, Ideas Quotes

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

6 years ago

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

Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Running Quotes , Animal Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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

Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Spiritual Quotes

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Reality Quotes , Years Quotes

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Self Quotes , Imagination Quotes

Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Building Up Quotes , Wave Quotes

Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Always Trying Quotes , Anxiety Quotes

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Lonely Quotes , Book Quotes

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Survival Quotes , Safe Quotes

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , People Quotes , Missing Quotes

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

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

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Action Quotes , Tendencies Quotes

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Tiny Quotes , Disappointing Quotes

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Life Quotes , Dust Quotes

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Atheist Quotes , People Quotes

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sex Quotes , Believe Quotes

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Practice Quotes , Contentment Quotes

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Optimistic Quotes , Frustration Quotes