Alain de Botton Quotes, Want Quotes, Married Quotes

What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.

5 years ago

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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.

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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.

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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.

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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.

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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

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At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and areoplanes to Australasia, we would still have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones, and apologise for our tantrums?

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According to one influential wing of modern secular society there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being 'like everyone else' for 'everyone else' is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and 'stand out' in whatever way their talents allow.

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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.

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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.

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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?

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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.

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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.

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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.

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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.

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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.

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Tags : Alain de Botton Quotes , Sadness Quotes , Feelings Quotes