The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
ALAIN DE BOTTONHappiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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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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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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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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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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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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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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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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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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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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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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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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