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 BOTTONTo one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
ALAIN DE BOTTON