One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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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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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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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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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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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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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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