Alain de Botton Quotes, Views Quotes, Luxury Quotes

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

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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Knowing Quotes , Exciting Quotes

Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.

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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: "If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Self Hatred Quotes

One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.

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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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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

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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

According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.

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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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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.

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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.

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

He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.

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

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Heart Quotes , Medicine Quotes