We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIntuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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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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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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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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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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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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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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
ALAIN DE BOTTON