The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
ALAIN DE BOTTONGood sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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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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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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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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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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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.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
ALAIN DE BOTTON