We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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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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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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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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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 we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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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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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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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.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
ALAIN DE BOTTON