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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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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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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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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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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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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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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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