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  • Alain de Botton Quotes   372
  • 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Goal Quotes , Anxiety Quotes
  • what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Home Quotes , Self 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mean Quotes , Connections Quotes
  • It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Appreciation Quotes
  • Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Cynical Quotes
  • It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Home Quotes , Self Quotes