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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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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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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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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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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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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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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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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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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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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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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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 finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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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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