Alain de Botton Quotes, Light Quotes, Smell Quotes

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

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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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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

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

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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Long Quotes , People Quotes

Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.

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It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.

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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.

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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

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

We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Views Quotes , Quality Quotes

He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.

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

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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury.

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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.

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

In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, "Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?"

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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

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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Greek Quotes , Rewards Quotes