Alain de Botton Quotes, Want Quotes, Married Quotes

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

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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.

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

Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.

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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

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We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.

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

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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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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.

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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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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.

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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.

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

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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.

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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

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Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Laughter Quotes , Optimistic Quotes

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.

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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

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