The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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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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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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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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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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Out 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.
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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 by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
ALAIN DE BOTTON