The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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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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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
ALAIN DE BOTTON