We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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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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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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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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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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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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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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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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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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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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