Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
ALAIN DE BOTTONI 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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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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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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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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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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