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Money Quotes by Alain de Botton

20 Money quotes by Alain de Botton

All Money quotes Alain de Botton’s page

De Botton’s thoughtful prose examines how money intertwines with meaning, desire, and contentment. In these 20 concise reflections he unpacks the psychological tug‑of‑war between material gain and inner fulfillment, offering a gentle nudge toward deeper understanding.

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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

Alain de Botton

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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

Alain de Botton

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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.

Alain de Botton

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“Most business meetings involve one party elaborately suppressing a wish to shout at the other: 'just give us the money'.”

Alain de Botton

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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.

Alain de Botton

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“There are two ways to make people richer, reasoned Rousseau: to give them more money or to restrain their desires.”

Alain de Botton

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Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant…

Alain de Botton

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“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often…

Alain de Botton

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“Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given…

Alain de Botton

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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer,…

Alain de Botton

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The humanities have been forced to disguise, both from themselves and their students, why their subjects really matter, for the sake of…

Alain de Botton

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“Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have…

Alain de Botton

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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make…

Alain de Botton

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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob…

Alain de Botton

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“What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and…

Alain de Botton

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It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand…

Alain de Botton

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“The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel…

Alain de Botton

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“Uniting the many challenges to the commercial meritocratic ideal is a threefold plea, that we cease investing with moral connotations something as…

Alain de Botton

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“For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never…

Alain de Botton

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“We are from a purely financial point of view greatly more generous than our ancestors ever were, surrendering up to half of…

Alain de Botton

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More by Alain de Botton

“To be mature is, we're told, to move beyond possessiveness. Jealousy is for babies. The mature person knows that no one owns anyone.”

Alain de Botton

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“He feared that by leaving her he would ruin her life - so he stayed, and did just that.”

Alain de Botton

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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.

Alain de Botton

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“The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality.”

Alain de Botton

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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

Alain de Botton

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“We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires…

Alain de Botton

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“Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements…

Alain de Botton

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I like the values associated with a medical family - common sense, being practical but also thoughtful.

Alain de Botton

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“Anyone who urgently needs us deserves, in the true book of love, to be our friend.”

Alain de Botton

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“We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not…

Alain de Botton

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“Half the ingratitude and complacency in the world down to how slowly and imperceptibly most good and bad things unfold.”

Alain de Botton

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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

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“Does what is praised becomes better? Does an emerald become worse if it isn't praised? And what a gold, ivory, a flower or a…

Alain de Botton

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The bourgeois thinkers of the eighteenth century thus turned Aristotle's formula on its head: satisfactions which the Greek philosopher had identified with leisure were…

Alain de Botton

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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

Alain de Botton

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