The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIn 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?”
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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 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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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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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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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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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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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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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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