Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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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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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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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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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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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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