We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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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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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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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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