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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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"You can't not help people just because they're stupid or forgetful or unpleasant... If I don't help them, who will?"
"Lift up your eyes and see the good in the world, for we are people with an amazing capacity to do great good. And if only the minority choose to exercise this capacity to the smallest degree, oh how wondrous and sweet the deeds performed at but a few hands!"
"When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman."
"There is nothing wrong with a human being. There is something wrong with his ideas."
"I don't want to be rich and famous but I want to die knowing I stood infront of a broken man and gave him one reason to smile again."
"I will not join the rat race because I'm not a rat. And I will not blindly follow a specific faith because I'm not a bat. The only race I'll take part in is for humans being humane. It's called the human race, and sadly it's got the least participants."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"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."
"I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it."
"Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to."
"We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us."
"It is according to how we are able to answer the question of what we do (normally the first enquiry we will have to field in any new acquaintance) that the quality of our reception is likely to be decided."
"We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane."
"Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy if ever better opportunities do come along. We might be isolated for now, but we'll be capable of far closer, more interesting bonds with anyone we do eventually locate."
"There is something improbably about the silence in the [subway] carriage, considering how naturally gregarious we are as a species. Still, how much kinder it is for the commuters to pretend to be absorbed in other things, rather than revealing the extent to which they are covertly evaluating, judging, condemning and desiring each other. A few venture a glance here and there, as furtively as birds pecking grain. But only if the train crashed would anyone know for sure who else had been in the carriage, what small parts of the nation's economy had been innocuously seated across the aisle just before the impact: employees of hotels, government ministries, plastic-surgery clinics, fruit nurseries and greetings-card companies."
"Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities."
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