Must being in love always mean being in pain?
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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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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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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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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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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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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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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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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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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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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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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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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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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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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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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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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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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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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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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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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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON