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"You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them."
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"For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and-by some sad, strange irony-it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy."

"We came, Takver thought, from a great distance to each other. We have always done so. Over great distances, over years, over abysses of chance. It is because he comes from so far away that nothing can separate us. Nothing, no distances, no years, can be greater than the distance that's already between us, the distance of our sex, the differences of our being, our minds; that gap, that abyss which we bridge with a look, with a touch, with a word, the easiest thing in the world. Look how far away he is, asleep. Look how far away he is, he always is. But he comes back, he comes back, he comes back...."

"Some people are like thorns. But you have to let them be thorns, because thorns can't turn into petals. The trick is not letting them prick you; never let a thorn prick you!"

"Those who laugh with you when you laugh are acquaintances, those who cry with you when you cry are companions, and those who do both are friends."

"Behind you, leave your enemies. Beside you, keep your family. Around you, maintain your friends. Within you, cherish God."

"Ok. You fuck me, then snub me. You love me, you hate me. You show me a sensitive side, then you turn into a total asshole. Is this a pretty accurate description of our relationship."

"I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life."

"Two married partners do not just live with each other, they live in each other, neurologically speaking."

"Lust likes to rush, while love hates to wait."

"You've got to know when to let a woman go if you want to keep her,and if you don't want to keep her you let her go anyhow so it's always a process of letting go, one way or the other."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton

"We never envy another's achievement more than when we know very little about how it was attained."

"We are properly ready for marriage when we are strong enough to embrace a life of frustration."

"The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury."

"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfAated but life-enhancing thoughts."

"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."

"What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty."

"A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one's life. There is an urge to say, 'I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me."

"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."

"Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough."

"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."
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