Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOnly as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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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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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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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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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON