A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Literature 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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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 inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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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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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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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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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
ALAIN DE BOTTON