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"The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person."
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"Simplicity gives you the power of freedom.Kindness gives you the power of boldness.Humility gives you the power of acceptance."

"Me, I've seen 45 years, and I've only figured out one thing. That's this: if a person would just make the effort, there's something to be learned from everything. From even the most ordinary, commonplace things, there's always something you can learn. I read somewhere that they said there's even different philosophies in razors. Fact is, if it weren't for that, nobody'd survive."

"Intelligence is not always the source of knowledge but love is."

"Often morality defines our inner philosophy."

"Knowledge can be borrowed but wisdom cannot because wisdom comes from experience."

"The best teacher teaches by inspiring students to learn by showing them the ultimate purpose of learning."

"Sometimes thinking is like talking to another person, but that person is also you."
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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