Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
ALAIN DE BOTTONOur responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven’t been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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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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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you’re human.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as ‘doing nothing’.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone – and finding that that’s ok with them.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
ALAIN DE BOTTON