The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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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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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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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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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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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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