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.
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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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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There’s a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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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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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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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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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers – and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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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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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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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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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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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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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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The need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.
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To one’s enemies: “I hate myself more than you ever could.
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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust’s therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Differ though we might with Christianity’s view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis.
ALAIN DE BOTTON