Alain de Botton Quotes, Book Quotes, Writing Quotes

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Humanity Quotes , Looks Quotes

It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others...Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.

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

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He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.

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

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

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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.

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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

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We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

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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.

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

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moving Quotes , Eye Quotes

I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Emotional Quotes