Alain de Botton Quotes

What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

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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

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

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

It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.

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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Always Trying Quotes , Anxiety Quotes

When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

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

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ambition Quotes , Simple Quotes

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Space Quotes , Community Quotes

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

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

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Play Quotes , Judgement Quotes

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Lonely Quotes , Book 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

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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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Trying Quotes , Truthful Quotes

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

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We should not be frightened by appearances.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Appearance Quotes , Should 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 seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Achievement Quotes , Challenges Quotes