It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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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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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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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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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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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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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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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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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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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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON