Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
ALAIN DE BOTTONRather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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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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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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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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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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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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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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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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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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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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Not everyone is worth listening 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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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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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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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTON