I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAt the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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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”.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
ALAIN DE BOTTON