We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONI went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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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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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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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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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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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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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
ALAIN DE BOTTON