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  • Alain de Botton Quotes   372
  • There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Inspire Quotes , One Day Quotes
  • Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Moving Quotes , Eye Quotes
  • One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Giving Up Quotes , Home Quotes
  • The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , Two 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Jobs Quotes , Book Quotes
  • 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.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Ideas Quotes , Cynical Quotes