Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
ALAIN DE BOTTON