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"It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble."
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"Even if everybody is looking at the same light bulb, the unique composition of an individual will dictate how they interpret and see things. Some people will only see things with their left eye (mind/moon), while others will use only their right (heart/sun). Some people are completely void of light and repel it immediately. For instance, a beetle will chase after an opening of light, while a cockroach will scatter at a crack of it. How are we different than the insects? Nobody is purely good or purely evil. Most of us are in-between. There are moths that explore the day and butterflies that play at night. Polarity is an integral part of nature - human or not human."
"Don't allow your imagination to colour events as lesser men would, and see movement in motionless things."
"For us, a pretty bird is a pretty bird; for an insect, pretty bird is an ugly enemy!"
"Appearance matters, we see your presentation before we get a chance to sample the substance within. You might miss a chance for the latter."
"There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?"
"Everything is just how I imagined it, yet everything is new."
"Hatred, as well as love, renders its votaries credulous."
"But there's so much that was a lie, it's hard to figure out what was true, what was real, what matters."
Explore more quotes by Alain de Botton
"The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil."
"What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation."
"The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word "luxury."
"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."
"Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope."
"To a shameful extent, the charm of marriage boils down to how unpleasant it is to be alone. This isn't necessarily our fault as individuals. Society as a whole appears determined to render the single state as nettlesome and depressing as possible: once the freewheeling days of school and university are over, company and warmth become dispiritingly hard to find; social life starts to revolve oppressively around couples; there's no one left to call or hang out with. It's hardly surprising, then, if when we find someone halfway decent, we might cling."
"Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours."
"At the heart of the pain created by sexual rejection is our habit of interpreting it as a moral judgement, when it might more accurately be categorized as a mere accident."
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