Alain de Botton Quotes, Home Quotes, Mind 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

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

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A good half of the art of living is resilience.

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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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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

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

The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left... having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.

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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.

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Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Country Quotes , Prayer Quotes

Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.

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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

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Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.

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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.

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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

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