Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude – not a punishment for making money.
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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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.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one’s own ambitions.
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Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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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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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or bicycle.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn’t call.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
ALAIN DE BOTTON