In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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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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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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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.
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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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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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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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