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"Few in this world are ever simply nasty; those who hurt us are themselves in pain. The appropriate response is hence never cynicism nor aggression but, at the rare moments one can manage it, always love."
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"It's not the depth of your intellect that will comfort you or transform your world. Only the richness of your heart and your generosity of spirit can do that."
"Murphy watched me thoughtfully for several empty seconds. Then she said, very gently, "You're a good man, Harry."I swallowed and bowed my head, made humble by the tone of her voice and the expression on her face, more than the words themselves.Not always rational," she said, smiling. "But you're the best kind of crazy."
"The palliative care nurses welcome him: he's a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. "We don't think of the clients here as dying," one of them said to him on his first visit. "After all everyone's dying, just some of us more slowly."
"We represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. . . . Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world."
"India believes in taking everyone together. Nepal was rattled with an earthquake. We provided assistance to them. We did so, on the grounds of humanity. Be it Yemen or Maldives, we tried to provide assistance at our best. Humanity is our central inspiration."
"People aren't just ants rushing around over a crust of bread. Every life, no matter how isolated, touches hundreds of others. It's up to us to decide if those micro connections are positive or negative. But whichever we decide, it does impact the ones we deal with. One word can give someone the strength they needed at that moment or it can shred them down to nothing. A single smile can turn a bad moment good. And one wrong outburst or word could be the tiny push that causes someone to slip over the edge into destruction."
"Life is full of intriguing souls that you cannot penetrate. An uncomfortable percentage of those anguished and impregnable souls also have suffering hearts that are further tormented by a deluded mind. They will hurt out of an impulse, and then live their lives after that without the slightest remorse."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfAated but life-enhancing thoughts."
"Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it."
"It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships."
"In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well."
"Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate."
"Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom."
"Being political doesn't only or principally mean caring what party wins the next election, to be political is to care about the happiness of strangers."
"It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things."
"The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness"."
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