People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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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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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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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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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
ALAIN DE BOTTON