Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
ALAIN DE BOTTONFor paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
ALAIN DE BOTTON