top of page
"There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Individuality quotes

"He got why Eleanor tried so hard to look different. Sort of. It was because she was different - because she wasn't afraid to be."

"Life is too short as we all know it to be. So why dare to spend it trying to live up to other people's worldly expectations of you?"

"I saw myself as an outsider as a teen. I was home-schooled and got my G.E.D. when I was 16 I wasn't interested in high school at all and figured that college might be more entertaining."

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people."

"She said my glasses made me look like a butch jock's locker room bitch."

"The world doesn't celebrate your similarity but your difference."

"Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well."

"Dare to be different."

"Nothing is more ridiculous than one person telling another how to live."

"Weeds blend in, roses stand out."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton

"Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it."

"Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."

"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."

"Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election, to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers."

"I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths."

"It is this idea 'decency' should be attached to wealth -and 'indecency'' to poverty - that forms the core of one strand of skeptical complaint against the modern status-ideal. Why should failure to make money be taken as a sign of an unconditionally flawed human being rather than of a fiasco in one particular area if the far larger, more multifaceted, project of leading a good life?Why should both wealth and poverty be read as the predominant guides to an individual's morals ?"

"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."

"[T]he unsympathetic assessments we make of others are usually the result of nothing more sinister than our habit of looking at them in the wrong way, through lenses clouded by distraction, exhaustion and fear, which blind us to the fact that they are really, despite a thousand differences, just altered versions of ourselves: fellow fragile, uncertain, flawed beings likewise craving love and in urgent need of forgiveness."
bottom of page