It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTrue love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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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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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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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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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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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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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
ALAIN DE BOTTON