The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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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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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
ALAIN DE BOTTON