The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
ALAIN DE BOTTONForcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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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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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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