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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.

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
Agree
Teach
May
Soul
Institutional
Trying
Religions
Way
Admire
Spirituality
God

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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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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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Alain de Botton
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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
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The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
Alain de Botton