Alain de Botton Quotes, Believe Quotes, Thinking Quotes

.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.

6 years ago

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

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

6 years ago

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

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

6 years ago

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

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Giving Up Quotes , Home Quotes

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Important Quotes , Benefits Quotes

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

6 years ago

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

We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.

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

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Anxiety Quotes , Shifting Quotes

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

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

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

6 years ago

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

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

6 years ago

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

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Writing Quotes , Trying 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

Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mind Quotes , Body Quotes

The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left... having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

6 years ago

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

I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Pieces 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

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Book Quotes , Asking 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

Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

6 years ago

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