What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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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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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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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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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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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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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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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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