What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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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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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
ALAIN DE BOTTON