People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAfter 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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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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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Curiosity 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.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness”.
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