Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMost victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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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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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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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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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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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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 flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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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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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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