One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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 homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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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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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
ALAIN DE BOTTON