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Alain de Botton Quotes - Page 3

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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.

Alain de Botton
Heart, People, Special
Twitter post from Sep 18, 2012

True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.

Alain de Botton
Love Is, Smartphones, Desire

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as beautiful, intelligent, and witty as we are ugly, stupid, and dull. But what if such a perfect being should one day turn around and decide they will love us back? We can only be somewhat shocked-how can they be as wonderful as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?

Alain de Botton
Beautiful, Witty, Falling In Love
Alain De Botton (1993). “On Love”, Grove/Atlantic

A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

Alain de Botton
Suicide, Animal, Inability
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.113, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Alain de Botton
Tools, Literature, Littles

It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

Alain de Botton
Understanding, Findings, Closest
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, 2000.

Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.

Alain de Botton
Smell, People, Ignored

Rather than getting more spoilt with age, as difficulties pile up, epiphanies of gratitude abound.

Alain de Botton
Gratitude, Grateful, Age

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

Alain de Botton
Thinking, Return, Different
Alain de Botton (2015). “On Love: A Novel”, p.72, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.

Alain de Botton
Achievement, Ordinary, Enough
"The Consolations of Philosophy". Book by Alain de Botton, Chapter IV, Consolation For Inadequacy, 2000.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Alain de Botton
Book, Reading, Moments
Twitter post from Sep 16, 2013

The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.

Alain de Botton
Sexy, Feelings, Excitement

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Alain de Botton
Character, Parent, Trying
Twitter post from Aug 16, 2017

Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.

Alain de Botton
Love Is, Suffering, Disease
Alain de Botton (2012). “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, p.59, Pan Macmillan

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

Alain de Botton
Impossible, Worried, Minutes

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

Alain de Botton
Thinking, Disrespect, Gazing

People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.

Alain de Botton
People, Personality, Needs

The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.

Alain de Botton
Difficulty, Oneself

There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

Alain de Botton
Lazy, Sloth, Quoting
Alain De Botton (1993). “Essays in Love”

Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.

Alain de Botton
Friendship, Travel, Company We Keep

Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

Alain de Botton
Wish, Agents, Would Be
Twitter post from Oct 21, 2010

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

Alain de Botton
Want, Married, Fascinating
"Office affairs". Interview with Lynn Barber, www.theguardian.com. March 21, 2009.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Alain de Botton
Book, Asking, Kind
Twitter post from Apr 27, 2015

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

Alain de Botton
Important, Benefits, Helping
Alain de Botton (2010). “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary”, p.32, Profile Books

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.

Alain de Botton
Goal, Anxiety, Promise
Alain De Botton (2008). “Status Anxiety”, p.197, Vintage

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