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"We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves."
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"The image of God is in every human."

"When we speak, dress, and think like others, we live with the goal of achieving the approval they have."

"I'm not abnegation, I'm not dauntless, I am Divergent."

"I feel like how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It's so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don't even know why you need it; you just think you do."

"Your original self is worth more than your imitation of someone else."

"Without accepting ourselves, we try to meet requirements of society and do everything to be accepted."

"Find yourself, who are you?Choose yourself, who can you be?Define yourself to find your destination."

"It's not the appearance that makes a man, it's the man that makes an appearance."

"The light of God's love makes us unique personalities."

"You are the author of your own destiny, write yourself into history books."
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."

"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."

"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."

"A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain."

"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."

"What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull."

"If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days."
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