There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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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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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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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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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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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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For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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