Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDon’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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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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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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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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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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