In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
ALAIN DE BOTTONto design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
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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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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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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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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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