As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
ALAIN DE BOTTONSo many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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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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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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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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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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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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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON