Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
ALAIN DE BOTTONArt cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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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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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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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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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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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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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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