Alain de Botton Quotes, Achievement Quotes, Ordinary Quotes

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".

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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).

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Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Emotional Quotes , Luxury Quotes

The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.

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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.

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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , World Quotes , Proust Quotes

In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.

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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.

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

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

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

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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.

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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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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.

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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.

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

It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.

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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.

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