We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONMy writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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We 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.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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