Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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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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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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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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