Alain de Botton Quotes, Practice Quotes, Play 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.

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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

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

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

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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.

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If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Life Quotes , Views Quotes

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

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

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Regret Quotes , Opportunity Quotes

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

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

Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bittersweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt and take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.

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

Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

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

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.

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

We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

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Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Stranger Quotes , Conversation Quotes

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moon Quotes , Men Quotes