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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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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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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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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
ALAIN DE BOTTON