Alain de Botton Quotes, Book Quotes, Giving Quotes

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

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

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Suffering Quotes , Behaviour Quotes

The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.

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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.

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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

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

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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Wish Quotes , Agents 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

How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

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

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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.

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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

[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Assessment Quotes , Differences Quotes

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Regret Quotes , Opportunity Quotes