A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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 fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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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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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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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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Perhaps 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.
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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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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON