Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTaking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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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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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
ALAIN DE BOTTON