Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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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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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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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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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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