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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDiffer though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for 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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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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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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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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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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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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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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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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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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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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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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