It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIntimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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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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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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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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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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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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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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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
ALAIN DE BOTTON