The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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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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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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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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