Alain de Botton Quotes, Jobs Quotes, Children Quotes

The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life.

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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.

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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

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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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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

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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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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.

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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.

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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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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

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We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

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Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

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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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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.

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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

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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