It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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All 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.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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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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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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