When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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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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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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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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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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