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"Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand."
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"I know it's impossible for you to see peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them-the bad kids and the good kids and all kids-as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for. Varying degrees of sick, varying degrees of neurotic, varying degrees of self- actualized."

"My dad finished chewing something and then put his fork down and looked at me. 'The longer I do my job,' he said. 'the more I realize that humans lack good mirrors. It's so hard for anyone to show us how we look, and so hard for us to show anyone how we feel.''That is really lovely,' my mom said. I liked that they liked each other. 'But isn't it also that on some fundamental level we find it difficult to understand that other people are human beings in the same way that we are? We idealize them as gods or dismiss them as animals.''True. Consciousness makes for poor windows, too. I don't think I'd ever thought about it quite that way."

"If you do not understand, you cannot love. You can only imagine that you love."

"If you are unable to reach a person you must know that this happens not because that the roads are closed but because you don't know the true paths to reach that person!"

"Avoid judging others by trying to understand others and their concepts of love and care."

"Sex is a form of exploration, it is asking questions and getting answer."

"Say, you teach a five year old child a few verses from the Bible. And after memorizing them, he will become a part scholar in Christian theology. But that won't make him realize what Jesus actually meant when he said 'love thy neighbor'."

"Getting rid of the wrong understanding and attaining the right understanding is indeed bliss."

"Understanding the value of time is understanding the true essence of life."

"True understanding lies beyond the desert."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton

"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."

"To appreciate life's small moments, it helps to have a sense the whole can never be made perfect."

"Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin."

"Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love."

"The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be."

"He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction."

"It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth."

"It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant."
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