One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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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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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
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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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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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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 not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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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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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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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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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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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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