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  • Alain de Botton Quotes   372
  • The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left... having no more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered and morally troubling fellow human beings.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Blessed Quotes , Humble Quotes
  • If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Falling In Love Quotes , Lying Quotes
  • We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Justice Quotes , Phrases Quotes
  • The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
  • 6 years ago



    Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , War Quotes , Land Quotes