Alain de Botton Quotes, Crazy Quotes, Maturity 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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Crazy Quotes , Maturity Quotes

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Essence Quotes , Alive Quotes

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

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

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

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Pain Quotes , Mean Quotes

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

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

Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Knowing Quotes , Exciting Quotes

Symons remarked that the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms - what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true calling.

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

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Philosophy Quotes , Writing 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

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

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

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

Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Obvious Things Quotes

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.

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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.

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

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Happiness Quotes , Quests Quotes

By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Self Quotes , Imagination Quotes

Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

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

It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Would Be Quotes , World Quotes