The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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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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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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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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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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