Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And 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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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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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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