What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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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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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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