It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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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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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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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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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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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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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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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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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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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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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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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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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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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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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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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