Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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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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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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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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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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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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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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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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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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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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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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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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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
ALAIN DE BOTTON