You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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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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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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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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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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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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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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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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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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