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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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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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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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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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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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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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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And 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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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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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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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