Alain de Botton Quotes, Friendship Quotes, Travel Quotes

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Matter Quotes , Moments Quotes

Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.

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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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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

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

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

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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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Self Hatred Quotes

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Life Quotes , Crazy Quotes

It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life? Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Life Quotes , Taken Quotes

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

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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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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

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Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.

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Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

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

Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.

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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

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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

Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

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