What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhen work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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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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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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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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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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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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I went to church and couldn’t swallow it. The music was nice but I don’t belong there.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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