Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
ALAIN DE BOTTONUnhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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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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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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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 very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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