We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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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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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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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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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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