Alain de Botton Quotes, Impossible Quotes, Worried Quotes

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Impossible Quotes , Worried Quotes

If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Good Life Quotes , Views Quotes

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.

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

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Heart Quotes , Medicine Quotes

Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Writing Quotes , Doing Nothing Quotes

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

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Revenge Quotes , Victory Quotes

Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Lonely Quotes , Book Quotes

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Jobs Quotes , Perfect Quotes

We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.

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

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Lying Quotes , Heart Quotes

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Majority Quotes , Stem 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.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Giving Up Quotes , Home Quotes

Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.

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

For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Understanding Quotes , Laziness Quotes

...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Love Quotes , May Quotes

When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Motivation Quotes , Inspiration Quotes

One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Art Quotes , Suffering Quotes

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Art Quotes , Pain Quotes

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

6 years ago

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