The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
ALAIN DE BOTTONFeeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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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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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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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.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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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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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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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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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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