A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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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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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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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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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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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
ALAIN DE BOTTON