A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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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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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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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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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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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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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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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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