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.
ALAIN DE BOTTONBad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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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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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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You need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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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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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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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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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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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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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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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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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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