The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOut of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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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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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
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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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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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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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