Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.
ALAIN DE BOTTONDiffer though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm… it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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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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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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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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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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