Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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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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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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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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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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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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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
ALAIN DE BOTTON