It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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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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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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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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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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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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