The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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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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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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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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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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Literature 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.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
ALAIN DE BOTTON