A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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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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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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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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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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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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