Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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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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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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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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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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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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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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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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