The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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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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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON