Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
ALAIN DE BOTTONCynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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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 should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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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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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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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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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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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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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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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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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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