The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMust being in love always mean being in pain?
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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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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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And 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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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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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.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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