It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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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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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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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.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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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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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON