The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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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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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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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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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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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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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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