You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you’re annoyed with them.
ALAIN DE BOTTONWhen I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I’m basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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One’s doing well if age improves even slightly one’s capacity to hold on to that vital truism: “This too shall pass.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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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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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don’t get on with machismo. I’m interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that’s what we are.
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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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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour.
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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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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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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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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