A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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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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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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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 mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
ALAIN DE BOTTON