In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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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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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
ALAIN DE BOTTON