Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
ALAIN DE BOTTONEnvy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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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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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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