The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
ALAIN DE BOTTONCuriosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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