One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThere’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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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 happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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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 are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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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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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTON