Alain de Botton Quotes, People Quotes, Missing Quotes

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

6 years ago

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

We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.

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

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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Layers Quotes , Interest Quotes

Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Blessed Quotes , Sadness Quotes

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Justice Quotes , Phrases Quotes

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Glasses Quotes , Understanding Quotes

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Pride Quotes , Expectations Quotes

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Class Quotes , Envy Quotes

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

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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sight Quotes , Hints 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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Ideas Quotes

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , May 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

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Worry Quotes , Enjoy Life Quotes