Alain de Botton Quotes, Thinking Quotes, Opposites Quotes

Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

6 years ago

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

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

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

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

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

It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Would Be Quotes , World Quotes

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hopeful Quotes , Angry Quotes

Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Trying Quotes , Truthful Quotes

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

6 years ago

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

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Travel Quotes , Information Quotes

The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left... having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

6 years ago

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

Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

6 years ago

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

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love And Friendship Quotes , And Love Quotes

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

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

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Important Quotes , Benefits Quotes

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Suffering Quotes , Behaviour Quotes

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Assessment Quotes , Differences Quotes

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Witty Quotes

Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Photography Quotes , Anxiety Quotes

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

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

Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ignorance Quotes , Dark Quotes

I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mean Quotes , Connections Quotes