It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
ALAIN DE BOTTONArtistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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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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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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