There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWriting isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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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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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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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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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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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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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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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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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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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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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
ALAIN DE BOTTON