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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTo one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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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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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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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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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON