Alain de Botton Quotes, Art Quotes, Imagination Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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

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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Drawing Quotes , Looks Quotes

Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.

6 years ago

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

I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.

6 years ago

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

As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Atheist Quotes , Thinking 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Essence Quotes , Alive Quotes

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

Most good thinking has its origin in fear.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Light Quotes , Smell Quotes

It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Eye Quotes , Our World Quotes

I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.

6 years ago

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

Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Goal Quotes , Anxiety 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.

6 years ago

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

Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Gratitude Quotes , Punishment Quotes

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.

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

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Baby Quotes , Disappointment Quotes

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.

6 years ago

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

William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Pride Quotes , Expectations Quotes

The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.

6 years ago

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

These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

6 years ago

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