Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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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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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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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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.
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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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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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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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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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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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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON