Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONI learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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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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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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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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 looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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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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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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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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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON