As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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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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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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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 company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
ALAIN DE BOTTON