Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTONI am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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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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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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