Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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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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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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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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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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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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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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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
ALAIN DE BOTTON