Alain de Botton Quotes, Majority Quotes, Stem Quotes

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Majority Quotes , Stem Quotes

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hopeful Quotes , Angry Quotes

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Running Quotes , Writing 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

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ambition Quotes , Love Is Quotes

In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Art Quotes , World Quotes

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

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

The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Children Quotes , Parent Quotes

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

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

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Difficulty Quotes

The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hands Quotes , Telephones Quotes

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Worry Quotes , Enjoy Life Quotes

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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , World Quotes , Proust Quotes

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Pride Quotes , Expectations Quotes

As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Writing Quotes , What Matters Quotes

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Practice Quotes , Contentment Quotes

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto." (p123) Architecture of Happiness

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Home Quotes , Self Quotes

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

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Loss Quotes , Frustration Quotes