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"The core " and perhaps unexpected " thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns " and in this sense simplify."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil."
"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."
"Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to....How different everything is for the craftsman who ... can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object--whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug--and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see."
"A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation."
"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfAated but life-enhancing thoughts."
"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."
"What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation."
"The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language."
"The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury."
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