You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Writing 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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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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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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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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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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
ALAIN DE BOTTON