I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
ALAIN DE BOTTONIn their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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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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Which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one-that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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.
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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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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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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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…if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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