Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIf 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.
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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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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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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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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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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For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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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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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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