What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
ALAIN DE BOTTONSocial media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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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.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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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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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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