Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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 their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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Rather 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.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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