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Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton Quotes

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Famous Alain de Botton Quotes

“Blind impatience is equally evident in the fruit section. Our ancestors might have delighted in the occasional handful of berries found on the underside of a bush in late summer, viewing it as a sign of the unexpected munificence of a divine creator, but we became modern when we gave up on awaiting sporadic gifts from above and sought to render any pleasing sensation immediately and repeatedly available.”

MightFoundModernDivineLateSummerBlindFruitCreatorAvailableUnexpectedSensationsAncestorEvidentSectionsHandfulOccasionalImpatienceDelightedGave UpBerriesSporadicLate Summer
Book:The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
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“It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.”

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Book:The Architecture of Happiness
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“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”

MightPleasureImagineInspireOne DayTransformationPsychologicalSymbolsPlanesDisplayImagine ThatAscentExemplarySwiftnessTakeoff
Author:Alain de Botton
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“We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.”

IfsWantFeelsShouldHas BeensReasonMightAbleFoundFeltViewsPowerfulSituationStudentsReadyOffersShould HaveStrongerDistanceSufficientMotiveGatesBedroomMight Have BeenRecogniseSuburbsEnviedActualityRioHigh Points
Author:Alain de Botton
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“Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.”

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Book:A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
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“He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.”

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Author:Alain de Botton
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“If optimism is important, it's because many outcomes are determined by how much of it we bring to the task. It is an important ingredient of success. This flies in the face of the elite view that talent is the primary requirement of a good life, but in many cases the difference between success and failure is determined by nothing more than our sense of what is possible and the energy we can muster to convince others of our due. We might be doomed not by a lack of skill, but by an absence of hope!”

IfsImportantMightFacesEnergyDifferencesViewsCasesTalentSkillsTasksOptimismDeterminedDuesAbsencePrimariesOutcomesConvinceIngredientsGood LifeElitesAnticipationDoomedRequirementsSuccess And FailureMuster
Author:Alain de Botton
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“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.”

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“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, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.”

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Author:Alain de Botton
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