Alain de Botton Quotes
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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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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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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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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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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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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
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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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Life is near-death experience.
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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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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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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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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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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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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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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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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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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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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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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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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
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The origins and travels of our purchases remain matters of indifference, although-to the more imaginative at least-a slight dampness at the bottom of a carton, or an obscure code printed along a computer cable, may hint at processes of manufacture and transport nobler and more mysterious, more worthy of wonder and study, than the very goods themselves.
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These entrepreneurs were writing their stories in a subgenre of contemporary fiction, the business plan, and populating them with characters endowed with deeply implausible personalities, an oversight which would eventually be punished not by a scathing review, … but by a lack of custom.