Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThe telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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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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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 mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Out 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.
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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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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
ALAIN DE BOTTON