Alain de Botton Quotes, Forgiving Quotes, Blame Quotes

We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Forgiving Quotes , Blame 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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Writing Quotes , Self Quotes

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Lazy Quotes , Sloth Quotes

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Should Quotes

After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Men Quotes , Age Quotes

I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Laughter Quotes , Optimistic Quotes

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.

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

We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Intelligent Quotes , Insanity Quotes

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

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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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Taken Quotes , Century Quotes

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Loss Quotes , Frustration Quotes

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Practice Quotes , Ideas Quotes

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Action Quotes , Tendencies 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

Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

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

It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ordinary Quotes , Example Quotes

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Contentment Quotes , World Quotes

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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Commitment Quotes

Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy.

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

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moving Quotes , Eye Quotes