Alain de Botton Quotes, Assessment Quotes, Differences 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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Assessment Quotes , Differences Quotes

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

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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

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

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

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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Book Quotes , Order Quotes

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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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.

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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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ordinary Quotes , Example Quotes

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sight Quotes , Hints Quotes

Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.

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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Self Quotes , Years 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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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Depressing Quotes , Mean Quotes

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

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Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Goal Quotes , Anxiety Quotes

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