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Authors:

Alain de Botton quotes

English Writer December 20, 1969

Alain de Botton quotes in french
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Quotes

Alain de Botton quote: "A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still..."
A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to. Alain de Botton
I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals,... Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton quote: "To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense..."
To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect. Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton quote: "The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our..."
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton quote: "Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who..."
Public life is debased because it's only the nice people who are worried about imposing their views on others. Alain de Botton
...a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment... because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time. Alain de Botton
Alain de Botton quote: "Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more..."
Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom. Alain de Botton
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
Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life. Alain de Botton
There is a danger of developing a blanket distaste for modern life which could have its attractions but lack the all-important images to help us identify them. Alain de Botton
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? Alain de Botton
The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort. Alain de Botton
There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39 Alain de Botton
My eyes were bewildered at their freedom. Without the motives that had marked the rest of the day - to seek out the airport, the exit out of Marseilles and so on - they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random and impatient patterns Alain de Botton
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. Alain de Botton

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