Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
ALAIN DE BOTTON…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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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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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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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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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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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.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
ALAIN DE BOTTON