There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
ALAIN DE BOTTONAs victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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Yet often, they know but just don’t care. So the task of serious journalism isn’t just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Cynics are – beneath it all – only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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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.
ALAIN DE BOTTON