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"To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect."
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Exlpore more Appreciation quotes
"Every once in a while God allows you to stub your toe as a kind reminder to be grateful for the miraculous body attached to it."
"Anything great will only be appreciated if I am given the opportunity to feel the absence of it, or experience the reversal of it. It is only then that I can even begin to understand its majesty and cherish it in the manner I should have all along."
"If you want to know the value of a day, ask someone who could not find food to eat or water to drink for a whole day when he is hungry."
"Water on earth came from space. Everything which is there was once upon a time not there and everything which is there shall return again to wherever they come from! When you see a beautiful ocean, or beautiful anything, remember this and appreciate them well!"
"Many things that don't really mean so much of anything, are wonderful."
"Fantasizing about the future is not wrong until and unless you are not missing the beauty of the present!"
"When we don't see the value of a thing, we don't put the protective edge."
"I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases....."
"Always celebrate people for who they are."
"You cannot truly enjoy a flower until you can see her inner beauty and feel her purpose of life."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"There is an easy way to measure our inner levels of abjectness and friendliness to ourselves: we should examine how well we response to noise."
"The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among."
"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."
"Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration. We may feel at risk of becoming overimpressed by architecture and engineering, of being dumbstruck by the Bombardier trains that progress driverlessly between satellites or by the General Electric GE90 engines that hang lightly off the composite wings of a Boeing 777 bound for Seoul. And yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness."
"The Anxiety of Sunday afternoon: your unlived lives and infinite possibility pressing upon the constraints of reality."
"What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it."
"A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself."
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