Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOne 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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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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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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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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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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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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