Alain de Botton Quotes

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.

Alain de Botton

• Life
• Truth
• Proud
• Purpose
• Lies
• Financial

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Quotes to Explore

• I like everything perfect. Everything has to be neat. My sister is 5, and she's more messy than I am. I make my bed every morning, everything's perfect. My shoes are all arranged. It's sad. I'm a little like Ray, a little bit.

  

  Dakota Fanning
  • She
  • Perfect
  • Morning

• You don't have to get it right the first time.

  

  Barbara Sher
  • Time
  • You
  • First

• Time has lost all meaning in that nightmare alley of the Western world known as the American mind.

  

  Florence King
  • Time
  • World
  • Mind

• All my life, the naysayers have told me that I can't win because I'm a progressive... because I'm a woman... even because I'm a lesbian.

  

  Tammy Baldwin
  • Life
  • Woman
  • Win

• I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.

  

  Patricia Clarkson
  • Friends
  • Best
  • Writers

• The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

  

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Guy
  • Small
  • Technology

• You have no ability, if you're a financial institution and you're threatened with criminal prosecution, you have no ability to negotiate.

  

  Warren Buffett
  • You
  • Financial
  • Ability

• I've never seen myself as a 'girl driver.' I'm just a driver.

  

  Danica Patrick
  • Girl
  • Myself
  • Never

• I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

  

  Abraham Lincoln
  • Men
  • Why
  • Man

• I've been designing since I was 8. I started sketching dresses I could wear when skating. I was always involved in all aspects of skating, not just the technique, the choreography, the music, but the visual aspects, too - what I should wear.

  

  Vera Wang
  • Music
  • Always
  • Dresses

• The best a health care system can do is to equip itself to meet the needs of each individual woman and birth. Those needs run the gamut from undisturbed home birth to planned cesarean section.

  

  Ina May Gaskin
  • Home
  • Health
  • Best

• A new era of responsibility is here.

  

  Valerie Jarrett
  • Responsibility
  • New
  • Here

• A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

  

  H. L. Mencken
  • Love
  • Man
  • Special

• Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children.

  

  Dan Quayle
  • Children
  • Teach
  • Teachers

• Utah's economy stays strong by adhering to conservative fundamental principles: low and consistent tax rates, smaller and more efficient government, sensible regulation, and empowering the private sector to create jobs.

  

  Gary Herbert
  • Strong
  • Government
  • Economy

• It's not healthy to be jealous.

  

  Victoria Beckham Spice Girls
  • Healthy
  • Jealous

• Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams.

  

  Nathan Myhrvold
  • Important
  • Powerful
  • Dreams

• There can be a lot of mind games going on between the players. When you're about to serve, people will try to throw you off your rhythm by taking a walk. If you're tired, you can't show that at all to an opponent.

  

  Rajiv Ouseph
  • People
  • Mind
  • Tired

• Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.

  

  Yael Grobglas
  • School
  • Home
  • Career

• I've never been tempted to do these hideous furniture shoes.

  

  Manolo Blahnik
  • Never
  • Shoes
  • Furniture

• Our passions are most like to floods and streams;The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb.

  

  Walter Raleigh
  • Deep
  • Dumb

• I'm not a big fan of the post-Armageddon stories, where Denzel Washington is walking around in a torn coat.

  

  Albert Brooks
  • Walking

• There was no blueprint or how-to manual for fixing a global financial meltdown, an auto crisis, two wars and a great recession, all at the same time.

  

  Rahm Emanuel
  • Time
  • Great
  • Financial

• 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.

  

  Alain de Botton
  • Life
  • Truth
  • Proud