It’s as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you’re living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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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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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others – because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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Literature is the greatest reality simulator – a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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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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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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The problem isn’t so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame; just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
ALAIN DE BOTTON