I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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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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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Rage 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.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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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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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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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