Alain de Botton Quotes, Life Quotes, Dust Quotes

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

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

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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Confused Quotes , Ambition Quotes

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

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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Return Quotes

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Should Quotes

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Want Quotes , Married Quotes

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

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

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

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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.

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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Relationship Quotes

Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Country Quotes , Prayer Quotes

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Hopeful Quotes , Angry Quotes

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Letting Go Quotes , Struggle Quotes

There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Real Quotes , Cards Quotes

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Morning Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

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

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Mean Quotes , Purpose Quotes