Alain de Botton Quotes, Giving Up Quotes, Home Quotes

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

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

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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

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To one's enemies: "I hate myself more than you ever could.

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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

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

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

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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

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

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

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We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on your knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves.

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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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Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe the the beloved now that they believe in us?

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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.

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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Understanding Quotes , Laziness Quotes