To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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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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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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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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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON