Alain de Botton Quotes, Numbers Quotes, People Quotes

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

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

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 , Should Quotes

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Lying Quotes , Heart Quotes

If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Successful Quotes , Incentives 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

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

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Vision Quotes , Use Quotes

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Men Quotes , Dust Quotes

Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Running Quotes , Animal Quotes

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

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

We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mind Quotes , New Work Quotes

When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Long Quotes , People 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

Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sublime Quotes , Bows Quotes

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hurt Quotes , Light Quotes

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

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

It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Would Be Quotes , World Quotes

The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , War Quotes , Land Quotes

The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Philosophy Quotes , Writing Quotes

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Obvious Things Quotes