The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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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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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
ALAIN DE BOTTON