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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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Trying
Religions
Way
Admire
Spirituality
God
Agree
Teach
May
Soul
Institutional
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
Alain de Botton
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
Alain de Botton
Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
Alain de Botton
The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
Alain de Botton
Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
Alain de Botton
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
Alain de Botton
We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
Alain de Botton
Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
Alain de Botton
The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
Alain de Botton
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
Alain de Botton
Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
Alain de Botton
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
Alain de Botton
Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
Alain de Botton
The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
Alain de Botton
Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
Alain de Botton
What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
Alain de Botton
By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
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
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
Alain de Botton
