Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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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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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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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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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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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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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 blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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