Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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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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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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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
ALAIN DE BOTTON