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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative 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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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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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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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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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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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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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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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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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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