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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTON