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  • Alain de Botton Quotes   372
  • Perhaps the easiest people to fall in love with are those about whom we know nothing. Romances are never as pure as those we imagine during long train journeys, as we secretly contemplate a beautiful person who is gazing out of the window – a perfect love story interrupted only when the beloved looks back into the carriage and starts up a dull conversation about the excessive price of the on-board sandwiches with a neighbour or blows her nose aggressively into a handkerchief.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Falling In Love Quotes
  • Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Writing Quotes , Simplicity Quotes
  • We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Witty Quotes
  • I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mean Quotes , Connections Quotes
  • It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. 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...Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion's questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Company We Keep Quotes , Expectations 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Song Quotes , Home Quotes
  • Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Art Quotes , Philosophy Quotes
  • Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Jobs Quotes , Sunday Quotes
  • The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , Two Quotes