I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTONPaying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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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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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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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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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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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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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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