People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIf one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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After 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.
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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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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
ALAIN DE BOTTON