If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
ALAIN DE BOTTONA good half of the art of living is resilience.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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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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Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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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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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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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn’t find anyone to talk to.
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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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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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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
ALAIN DE BOTTON