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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONInsomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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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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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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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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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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