Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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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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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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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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