Alain de Botton Quotes

Not everyone is worth listening to.

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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.

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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we're truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

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

It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Infidelity Quotes , Growing Quotes

People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.

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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.

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

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

Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Annoyed Quotes , Anxiety Quotes

Must being in love always mean being in pain?

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

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sleep Quotes , Mind Quotes

Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.

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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.

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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Reality Quotes , Choices Quotes

.. if you asked most people whether they believed in love or not, they’d probably say they didn’t. Yet that’s not necessarily what they truly think. It’s just the way they defend themselves against what they want. They believe in it, but pretend they don’t until they’re allowed to. Most people would throw away all their cynicism if they could. The majority just never gets the chance.

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

The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.

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

What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Numbers Quotes , People Quotes