The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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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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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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The good parent: someone who doesn’t mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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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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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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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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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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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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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
ALAIN DE BOTTON