When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.
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The flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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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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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what’s on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it’s not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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