Alain de Botton Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

  Alain de Botton

  Love, Two, People

• Nowhere was the airport's charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities.

  Alain de Botton

  Country, Prayer, Airports

  Alain de Botton (2010). “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary”, p.22, Profile Books

• These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.

  Alain de Botton

  Heart, Ideas, Effort

  "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work". Book by Alain de Botton, 2009.

• The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones...If...we are obliged to create our own language, it is because there are dimensions to ourselves absent from clichés, which require us to flout etiquette in order to convey with greater accuracy the distinctive timbre of our thought.

  Alain de Botton

  Order, Ideas, Dimensions

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