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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONKant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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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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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
ALAIN DE BOTTON