It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
ALAIN DE BOTTONThese inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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It wasn’t only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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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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Good sex isn’t just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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Our sadness won’t be of the searing kind but more like a blend of joy and melancholy: joy at the perfection we see before us, melancholy at an awareness of how seldom we are sufficiently blessed to encounter anything of its kind.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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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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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Politics is so difficult, it’s generally only people who aren’t quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
ALAIN DE BOTTON