When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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