It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
ALAIN DE BOTTONEnvy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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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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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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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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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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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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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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 problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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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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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.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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