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.
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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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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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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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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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.
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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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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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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 is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
ALAIN DE BOTTON