Alain de Botton Quotes, Ideas Quotes, Cynical Quotes

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

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

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

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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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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.

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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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Wish Quotes , Agents Quotes

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

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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

Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.

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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane; but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.

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

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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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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Understanding Quotes , Laziness Quotes

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

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Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Revenge Quotes , Intelligent 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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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

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

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

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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Life Quotes , Dust Quotes