I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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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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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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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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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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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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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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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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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
ALAIN DE BOTTON