The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
ALAIN DE BOTTONGetting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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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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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
ALAIN DE BOTTON