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"We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need - but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need - within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves."
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"Create and maintain a beautiful environment and surroundings in which to live."
"Desire to dwell in a clean environment."
"I don't know why we keep building these fucking dams, Adams said in a surprisingly forceful British whisper. "Not only do they cause environmental and social disasters, they, with very few exceptions, all fail to do what they were supposed to do in the first place. Look at the Amazon, where they've all silted up. What is the reaction to that? They're going to build another eighty of them. It's just balmy. We must have beaver genes or something. . . . There's just this kind of sensational desire to build dams, and maybe that should be looked at and excised from human nature. Maybe the Human Genome Project can locate the beaver/dam-building gene and cut that out."
"There can never be any real freedom on earth as long as people try to exert ownership over the natural resources of the world."
"Misery loves good company, so if you are surrounded with drama, gossip and fools you may want to consider that you are presently at risk of becoming one of them."
"Clean communities, healthy citizens."
"The bicycle is a former child's toy that has now been elevated to icon status because, presumably, it can move the human form from pillar to post without damage to the environment."
"The significance of the dwelling is in the dweller."
"The Cowles Commission was the optimal environment for the type of research that I wanted to do."
"Environmental cleanliness begins with individual desire to be clean."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained."
"We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration."
"The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury."
"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfAated but life-enhancing thoughts."
"He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor."
"What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."
"A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me."
"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."
"Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough."
"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."
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