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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWriting isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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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.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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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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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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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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