Alain de Botton Quotes, Blessed Quotes, Humble 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.

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

.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.

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

Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.

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

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

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

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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Light Quotes , Smell 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.

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

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

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

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Dream Quotes , Art Quotes

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

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

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

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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

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Justice Quotes , Phrases Quotes