It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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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 not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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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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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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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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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON