Not everyone is worth listening to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONHappiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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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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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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