It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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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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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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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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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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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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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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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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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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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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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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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 pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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