Alain de Botton Quotes, Baby Quotes, Disappointment Quotes

If the behaviour of babies and small children is any guide, we emerge into the world with our tendencies to imbalance already well entrenched. In our playpens and high chairs, we are rarely far from displaying either hysterical happiness or savage disappointment, love or rage, mania or exhaustion--and, despite the growth of a more temperate exterior in adulthood, we seldom succeed in laying claim to lasting equilibrium, traversing our lives like stubbornly listing ships on choppy seas.

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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.

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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

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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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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?

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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.

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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.

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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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The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.

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Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

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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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William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. 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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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.

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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.

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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.

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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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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.

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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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