Alain de Botton Quotes, Looks Quotes, Way Quotes

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

6 years ago

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

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

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

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

6 years ago

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

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Character Quotes , Parent Quotes

Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Religious 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.

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

6 years ago

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

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Real Quotes , Cards Quotes

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Depressing Quotes , Mean 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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Successful Quotes , Exciting Quotes

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

6 years ago

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

I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Nice Quotes

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

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

My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Writing Quotes

There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'

6 years ago

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

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

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

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.

6 years ago

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