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.
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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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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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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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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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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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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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
ALAIN DE BOTTON