Alain de Botton Quotes, Motivation Quotes, Believe Quotes

The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

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

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

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

People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

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

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Careers Quotes , Two Quotes

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Life Quotes , Dust Quotes

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Views Quotes , Luxury Quotes

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Pain Quotes , Mean Quotes

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mind Quotes , New Work Quotes

Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hate Quotes , Compassion Quotes

There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Inspire Quotes , One Day Quotes

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Animal 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

I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sex Quotes , Suggestions Quotes

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

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

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

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

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sports Quotes , Real 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.

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