What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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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 dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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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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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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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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