What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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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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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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