It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONNever too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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For paranoia about ‘what other people think’ : remember that only some hate, a very few love – and almost all just don’t care.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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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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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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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We 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.
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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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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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