We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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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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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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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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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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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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