The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIntimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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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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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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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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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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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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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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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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