People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
ALAIN DE BOTTON