The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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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.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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