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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
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Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Unhappiness
Perspective
Happiness
Play
Stem
More quotes by 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
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
Alain de Botton
Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
Alain de Botton
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
Alain de Botton
The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
Alain de Botton
A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
Alain de Botton
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
Alain de Botton
Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
Alain de Botton
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
Alain de Botton
Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
Alain de Botton
It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
Alain de Botton
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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
Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
Alain de Botton
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de Botton
Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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
It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
Alain de Botton
