You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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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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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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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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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON