The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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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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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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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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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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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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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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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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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
ALAIN DE BOTTON