We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
ALAIN DE BOTTONUnnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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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 fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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We 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.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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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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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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