The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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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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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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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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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON