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?
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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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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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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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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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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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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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON