Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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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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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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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 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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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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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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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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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.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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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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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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