In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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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.
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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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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.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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