If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWe are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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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 think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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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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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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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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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON