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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTrue love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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 longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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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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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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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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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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