You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWork finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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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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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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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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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
ALAIN DE BOTTON