The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
ALAIN DE BOTTONEvery adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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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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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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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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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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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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