He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOut 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.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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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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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths – by panicked shouting.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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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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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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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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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.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
ALAIN DE BOTTON