Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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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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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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