Alain de Botton Quotes, Distance Quotes, Curiosity Quotes

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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Distance Quotes , Curiosity Quotes

Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Believe Quotes , Divorce 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

Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

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

The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Soul Quotes

Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Emotional Quotes , Luxury 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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Song Quotes , Home Quotes

Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Spring Quotes , Events Quotes

All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

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

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

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

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

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

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

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

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ambition Quotes , Simple Quotes

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Cry Quotes

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Real Quotes , Weakness Quotes

We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Soul Quotes

One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Disappointment Quotes

There are things that are not spoken about in polite society. Very quickly in most conversations you'll reach a moment where someone goes, 'Oh, that's a bit heavy,' or 'Eew, disgusting.' And literature is a place where that stuff goes; where people whisper to each other across books, the writer to the reader. I think that stops you feeling lonely – in the deeper sense, lonely.

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

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Wish Quotes , Agents Quotes

The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

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