One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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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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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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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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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON