It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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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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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.
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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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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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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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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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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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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
ALAIN DE BOTTON