The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
It 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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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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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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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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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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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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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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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
ALAIN DE BOTTON -
Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON