It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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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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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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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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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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It 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.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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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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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
ALAIN DE BOTTON