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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDo 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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 our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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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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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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