Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
ALAIN DE BOTTONPerhaps 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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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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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don’t know certain things.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously – and is confident enough to admit when it’s in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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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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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
ALAIN DE BOTTON