What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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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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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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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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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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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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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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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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