Alain de Botton Quotes, Practice Quotes, Contentment Quotes

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Practice Quotes , Contentment 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

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Gratitude Quotes , Punishment Quotes

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

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

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Distance Quotes , Curiosity Quotes

You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Long Quotes , Alcohol Quotes

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"

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

The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

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

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

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

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

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

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

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

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Book Quotes , Giving Quotes

The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

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

The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

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

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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Eye Quotes , Our World 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

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Annoyed Quotes , Anxiety 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