Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
ALAIN DE BOTTONSocrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, “Don’t you worry about being called names?” retorted, “Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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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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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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It’s perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living; it’s perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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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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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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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 looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
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Although I don’t believe in God, Bach’s music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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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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Memory is… similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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