Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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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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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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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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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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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON