Alain de Botton Quotes, Jobs Quotes, Sunday Quotes

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Jobs Quotes , Sunday Quotes

The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Vision Quotes , Use Quotes

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.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Is Quotes , Views Quotes

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ordinary Quotes , Example Quotes

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Eels Quotes , Style Quotes

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Significant Things Quotes , People Quotes

We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Home Quotes , Dwelling Quotes

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

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

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Age Quotes , Aging Quotes

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Giving Up Quotes , Home Quotes

Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Careers Quotes , Two Quotes

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ego Quotes , Ignored Quotes

Every fall into love involves the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. We fall in love hoping we won't find in another what we know is in ourselves, all the cowardice, weakness, laziness, dishonesty, compromise, and stupidity. We throw a cordon of love around the chosen one and decide that everything within it will somehow be free of our faults. We locate inside another a perfection that eludes us within ourselves, and through our union with the beloved hope to maintain (against the evidence of all self-knowledge) a precarious faith in our species.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Falling In Love Quotes , Elude Us Quotes

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

6 years ago

Message Copied

Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Levels Quotes

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

6 years ago

Message Copied

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