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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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
Wants
Everyone
Better
Life
People
More quotes by Alain de Botton
We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
Alain de Botton
The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
Alain de Botton
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Alain de Botton
We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Alain de Botton
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
Alain de Botton
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
Alain de Botton
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
As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
Alain de Botton
Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
Alain de Botton
After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
Alain de Botton
There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
Alain de Botton
Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Alain de Botton
The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
Alain de Botton
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton
Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
Alain de Botton
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
Alain de Botton
