Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices, telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown our the faint sounds emitted from our souls, and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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Life is near-death experience.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, 'Don’t you worry about being called names?' retorted, 'Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?'
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By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
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I … thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Though the terrain of frustration may be vast - from a stubbed toe to an untimely death - at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm’s Human Resources department.
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It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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It appeared that the one area in which Sir Bob excelled was anxiety. He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others’ mediocrity-suggesting that a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
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Year-end financial statements … express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable-yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating-than an evolutionary biologist’s proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
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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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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.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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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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Workers were occupied with the ancient task of trying to stay alive, which simply happened to require, in a consumer economy overwhelmingly based on the satisfaction of peripheral desires, a series of activities all to easily confused with clownishness.