Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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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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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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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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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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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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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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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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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
ALAIN DE BOTTON