What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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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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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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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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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
ALAIN DE BOTTON