Alain de Botton Quotes, Writing Quotes, Use Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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

It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Achievement Quotes , Challenges Quotes

Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Art Quotes , Promise 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.

6 years ago

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

Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.

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

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

6 years ago

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

What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Tiny Quotes , Disappointing Quotes

Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Gratitude Quotes , Grateful Quotes

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

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

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

According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

6 years ago

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

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

6 years ago

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

The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

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

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

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

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

For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.

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

To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

6 years ago

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

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.

6 years ago

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

We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Home Quotes , Mind 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?

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moon Quotes , Men Quotes