Alain de Botton Quotes, Believe Quotes, Moments Quotes

Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.

6 years ago

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

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.

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

It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Stranger Quotes , Conversation Quotes

The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Country Quotes , May Quotes

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into the French nobility four centuries ago, though at least an aristocratic age was franker, and therefore kinder, about the odds. It did not relentlessly play up the possibilities open to all, and so, in turn, did not cruelly equate an ordinary life with a failed one.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Reality Quotes , Odds Quotes

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

6 years ago

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

There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , People Quotes , Missing 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

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

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

The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

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

Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Food Quotes , People 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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hate Quotes , Enemy Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Falling In Love Quotes

What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Giving Up Quotes , Ambition Quotes

Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.

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

The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Successful Quotes , Thinking 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

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

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

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sleep Quotes , Mind Quotes