Alain de Botton Quotes, Love Is Quotes, Views Quotes

To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.

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

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Smartphones Quotes , Interesting Quotes

The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.

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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.

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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.

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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.

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

If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Falling In Love Quotes , Lying Quotes

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Believe Quotes , God Love Quotes

Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

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

If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.

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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Crowds Quotes , Stuff Quotes

At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moon Quotes , Men 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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It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.

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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.

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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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Reality Quotes , Choices 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 should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Eye Quotes , Our World Quotes

Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.

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