We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.
ALAIN DE BOTTONYou need a long hard day’s work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
More Alain de Botton Quotes
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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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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I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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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 best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.
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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.
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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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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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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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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Work is most fulfilling when you’re at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
ALAIN DE BOTTON