I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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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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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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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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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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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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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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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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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.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
ALAIN DE BOTTON