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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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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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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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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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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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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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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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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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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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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON