Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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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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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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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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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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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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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
ALAIN DE BOTTON