Alain de Botton Quotes, Joy Quotes, Remarkable Quotes

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Joy Quotes , Remarkable Quotes

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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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.

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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.

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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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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

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

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It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.

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

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

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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, "Don't you worry about being called names?" retorted, "Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?

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

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.

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On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Space Quotes , Community Quotes

The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were now transposed to the sphere of work, while tasks lacking in any financial reward were drained of all significance and left to the haphazard attentions of decadent dilettantes. It now seemed as impossible that one could be happy and unproductive as it had once seemed unlikely that one could work and be human.

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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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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.

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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