Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
ALAIN DE BOTTONLiterature 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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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 need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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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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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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