We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhat kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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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.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
ALAIN DE BOTTON