The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
ALAIN DE BOTTONWithout sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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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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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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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.
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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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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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON