The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
ALAIN DE BOTTONA 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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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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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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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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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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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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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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