Alain de Botton Quotes, Baby Quotes, Disappointment Quotes

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

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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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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

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We should not be frightened by appearances.

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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread

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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

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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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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

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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.

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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

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