One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
ALAIN DE BOTTONIn a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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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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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
ALAIN DE BOTTON