Alain de Botton Quotes, Morning Quotes, Thinking Quotes

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

6 years ago

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

Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Years Quotes , Lasts Quotes

Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Religious Quotes

The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Glasses Quotes , Understanding 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 might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Powerful Quotes , Distance Quotes

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

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We should not be frightened by appearances.

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

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

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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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Is Quotes , Suffering Quotes

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.

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

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.

6 years ago

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

The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , God Quotes , Spiritual Quotes

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Understanding Quotes , Findings 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

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moving Quotes , Journey Quotes

Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sex Quotes , Believe Quotes