It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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