Alain de Botton Quotes, Order Quotes, Ideas Quotes

The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones...If...we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

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

We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Book Quotes , Order 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

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

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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

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

The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.

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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Spring Quotes , Events 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

A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.

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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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It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ordinary Quotes , Example Quotes

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

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

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.

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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.

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

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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Smartphones Quotes , Interesting Quotes