Alain de Botton Quotes, Impossible Quotes, Worried Quotes

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Impossible Quotes , Worried Quotes

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

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

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

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

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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Falling In Love Quotes , Health Quotes

Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.

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

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.

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

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

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

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Levels Quotes

The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Relationship Quotes , Intimacy Quotes

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"

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Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Gratitude Quotes , Grateful Quotes

I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

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