Us Quotes by Alain de Botton

13 Us quotes by Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton reflects on the philosophical underpinnings of community in a succinct collection. Thirteen thoughts probe the emotional architecture that holds us together.

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Learning to give up on perfection may be just about the most romantic move any of us could make.

Alain de Botton

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My theory is that many of the things that move us are things we long for but find hard to do.

Alain de Botton

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The person who is truly best suited to us is not the person who shares our tastes, but the person who can…

Alain de Botton

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In 'Art as Therapy', we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand…

Alain de Botton

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Art can do the opposite of glamourise the unattainable: it can show us anew the genuine merit of life as we're forced…

Alain de Botton

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Asking someone to be with us turns out to be an impossibly demanding and therefore pretty mean thing to suggest to anyone…

Alain de Botton

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We don't sulk with everybody. We limit our sulks to a very particular person: the person who's supposed to love us and…

Alain de Botton

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If buying art is to matter to us deeply, then it has to engage with our emotions and bring something to what…

Alain de Botton

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Secular thinkers have a separation between thinking and doing. They don't have a grasp of the balance sheet. The doers are selling…

Alain de Botton

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Artworks are especially good at helping our psyches in a variety of ways: they rebalance our moods, lend us hope, usher in…

Alain de Botton

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Most of the time, we make discoveries about how difficult people are at the moment when the difficulties have actually hurt us;…

Alain de Botton

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The solution as consumers is - perhaps surprisingly - to take adverts very, very seriously. We should ask ourselves what it is…

Alain de Botton

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Religions have always been clearly on to this psycho-therapeutic score. For hundreds of years in the West, Christian art had a very…

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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