It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
ALAIN DE BOTTONLiterature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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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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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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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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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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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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