Alain de Botton Short Quotes

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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

Alain de Botton
The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

Alain de Botton
Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.

Alain de Botton
There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

Alain de Botton
Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.

Alain de Botton
As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

Alain de Botton
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.

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

Alain de Botton
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.

Alain de Botton
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

Alain de Botton
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

Alain de Botton
Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.

Alain de Botton
True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

Alain de Botton
It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.

Alain de Botton
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Alain de Botton
Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.

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

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

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

Alain de Botton
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

Alain de Botton
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

Alain de Botton
One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.

Alain de Botton
If the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.

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

Alain de Botton
To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

Alain de Botton
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

Alain de Botton
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

Alain de Botton
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.

Alain de Botton
When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.

Alain de Botton
What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.

Alain de Botton