The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
ALAIN DE BOTTONTrue respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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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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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
ALAIN DE BOTTON