Alain de Botton Quotes, Want Quotes, Married Quotes

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

6 years ago

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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

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

The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.

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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.

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

We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

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

Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.

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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind. The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Blessed Quotes , Sadness 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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You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.

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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread

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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Infidelity Quotes , Growing Quotes

The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Dream Quotes , Art 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 best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.

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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

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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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