We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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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 media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON