William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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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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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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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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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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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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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON