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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
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
Guides
Confused
Envy
Ambition
Tangled
Ambitions
Guide
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
Alain de Botton
We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
Alain de Botton
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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
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
There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
Alain de Botton
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
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
So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de Botton
The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
Alain de Botton
The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
Alain de Botton
The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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
We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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
Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
Alain de Botton
Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alain de Botton
