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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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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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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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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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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 read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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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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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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