The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
ALAIN DE BOTTONEnvy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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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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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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