You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTONRage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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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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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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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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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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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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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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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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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
ALAIN DE BOTTON