Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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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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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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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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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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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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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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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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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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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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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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