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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIt is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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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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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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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON