Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAll 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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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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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 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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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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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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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