At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
ALAIN DE BOTTONA successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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We 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.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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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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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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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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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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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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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON