Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIf our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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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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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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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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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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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON