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 BOTTONWe need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don’t bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest – in all its ardour and paradoxes – than our travels.
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We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
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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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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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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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It’s hard loving those who don’t much like themselves: “If you’re so great, why would you think I’m so great.
ALAIN DE BOTTON