Alain de Botton Quotes, Meaningful Quotes, Real 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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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

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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

Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.

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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.

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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

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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.

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

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

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

It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.

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

The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Looks Quotes , Way Quotes

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver - because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator - a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

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

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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , Two Quotes

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

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

Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Summer Quotes , Berries 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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A good half of the art of living is resilience.

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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

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