Alain de Botton Quotes, Jobs Quotes, Sunday Quotes

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.

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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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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

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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

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.

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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

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

The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.

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

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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

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

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I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

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