The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAlthough I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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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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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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A ‘good job’ can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.
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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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What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON