A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONto design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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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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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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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 blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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