One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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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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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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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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to 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
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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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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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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 very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON