The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
ALAIN DE BOTTONLiterature 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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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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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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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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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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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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