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99e93b5
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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Alain de Botton |
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7a975ea
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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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Alain de Botton |
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8667e37
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no one is able to produce a great work of art without experience, nor achieve a worldly position immediately, nor be a great lover at the first attempt; and in the interval between initial failure and subsequent success, in the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation. We suffer because we cannot spontaneously master the ingredients of fulfilment.
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Alain de Botton |
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937d32e
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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Alain de Botton |
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a5cea9e
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Alain de Botton |
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db58452
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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Alain de Botton |
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d9e8c3b
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic; yet at heart she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as "mushy."
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Alain de Botton |
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af9fcd1
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As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.
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Alain de Botton |
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4438dad
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In the oasis complex, the thirsty man images he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, 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 withe..
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love
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Alain de Botton |
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7639452
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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affirmation
status
self-esteem
insecurity
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Alain de Botton |
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8bd83a4
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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
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Alain de Botton |
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27b071b
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In an ideal world, marriage vows would be entirely rewritten. At the altar, a couple would speak thus: "We accept not to panic when, some years from now, what we are doing today will seem like the worst decision of our lives. Yet we promise not to look around, either, fro we accept that there cannot be better options out there. Everyone is always impossible. We are a demented species."
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Alain de Botton |
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2d2bce0
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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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self-doubt
others
value
uncertainty
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Alain de Botton |
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075d50f
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When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security ..
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meaning
work
collective-good
jobs
connections
impact
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Alain de Botton |
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8162160
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It's not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are - beneath the bluster - intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, and pitiful and in search of consolation and forgiveness. We're well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness and fury. We can recalibrate ..
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Alain de Botton |
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5becdad
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Alain De Botton |
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e72f0b5
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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Alain de Botton |
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dac19ed
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We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need -- but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need -- within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of o..
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identity
home
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Alain de Botton |
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8d068d0
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See how small your are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger that you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our life is not the measure of all things: consider sublime places a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.
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Alain de Botton |
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94df7fb
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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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Alain de Botton |
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6dd3b59
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Alain de Botton |
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703296c
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In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.
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Alain de Botton |
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ed50aa6
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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
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Alain de Botton |
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817c196
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The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.
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Alain de Botton |
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427f05a
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When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.
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Alain de Botton |
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8a27b56
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at the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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Alain de Botton |
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56f181b
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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
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Alain de Botton |
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03528bf
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Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and out weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believ..
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Alain de Botton |
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21b46a1
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We take this idea of love with us into adulthood. Grown up, we hope for a re-creation of what it felt like to be ministered to and indulged. In a secret corner of our mind, we picture a lover who will anticipate our needs, read our hearts, act selflessly and make everything better. It sounds 'romantic'; yet it is a blueprint for disaster.
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Alain de Botton |
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e445929
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The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted ..
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work
nervous-energy
relaxation
coffee
exhaustion
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Alain de Botton |
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1755d7c
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He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest's eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor.
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intelligence
significance
professionalism
vulnerability
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Alain de Botton |
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b51861e
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What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves
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Alain de Botton |
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a1b00b5
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Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
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hopes
life
respite
goals
desire
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Alain de Botton |
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859abae
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It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts wh..
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reality
achievements
electronics
information
thinking
concentration
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Alain de Botton |
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ccfc36f
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where "ordinary" life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort."
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status
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Alain de Botton |
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bbd5387
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Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraord..
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Alain De Botton |
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e78658c
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He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity--suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
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intelligence
fault-finding
mediocrity
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Alain de Botton |
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30ff1b1
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At the heart of sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worth of one. We should add that it is a privileg..
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Alain de Botton |
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bba7e93
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Love begins with the experience of being understood in highly supportive and uncommon ways. They grasp the lonely parts of us; we don't have to explain why we find a particular joke so funny; we have the same people; we both want to try that rather specialised sexual scenario. It cannot continue. When we run up against the reasonable limits of our lovers' capacities for understanding, we mustn't blame them for dereliction. They were not tr..
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Alain de Botton |
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53caf8a
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Though we sometimes suspect that people are hiding things from us, it is not until we are in love that we feel an urgency to press our inquiries, and in seeking answers, we are apt to discover the extent to which people disguise and conceal their real lives.
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Alain de Botton |
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d347ace
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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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Alain de Botton |
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c659c01
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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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Alain de Botton |
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066131f
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It's profoundly counter-intuitive for us to think of ourselves as mad. We seem so normal and mostly so good - to ourselves. It's everyone else who is out of step... And yet maturity begins with the capacity to sense and, in good time and without defensiveness, admit to our own craziness. If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn't begun.
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Alain de Botton |
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c97815c
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Alain de Botton |