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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Alain de Botton
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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Everyone
Sense
Become
Littles
Little
Different
Think
Returns
Thinking
Return
More quotes by Alain de Botton
When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
Alain de Botton
Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.
Alain de Botton
Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
Alain de Botton
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
Alain de Botton
At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
Alain de Botton
Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
Alain de Botton
It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain de Botton
Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
Alain de Botton
We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
Alain de Botton
What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
Alain de Botton
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
Alain de Botton
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
Alain de Botton
The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
Alain de Botton
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
Alain de Botton
Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
Alain de Botton
Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
Alain de Botton
Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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
A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain de Botton
Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
Alain de Botton
