The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can’t accept that.
ALAIN DE BOTTONHow do the stems connect to the roots?’ ‘Where is the mist coming from?’ ‘Why does one tree seem darker than another?’ These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Those who divorce aren’t necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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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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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Maturity: knowing where you’re crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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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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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word “luxury.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other’s smartphone.
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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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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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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 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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True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn’t worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there’s no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven’t had a good time, “Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?”
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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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 flawless object throws into perspective the mediocrity that surrounds it. We are reminded of the way we would wish things always to be and of how incomplete our lives remain.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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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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