I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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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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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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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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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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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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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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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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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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