Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost good thinking has its origin in fear.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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