Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we’ve made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we’re in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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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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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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When 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.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.
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It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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