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"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
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"Happiness can only bloom in the garden of peace."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You can love again."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Our main purpose of life is to be happy. Happiness is in simplicity, and the most amazing things about life is that it is so simple."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Children are happy because they have the power of finding happiness in the simplest things."
Author Name
Personal Development
"My life is wondrous, and I appreciate it every day!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"We savour on great memories of happy times."
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Personal Development
"You are only a poor person if you are not happy with what you have."
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Personal Development
"A joyful heart is an endless flowing stream."
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Personal Development
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"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
Life
"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
Literature
"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."
Memory
"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
Life
"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
Philosophy
"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?"
Observation
"Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death."
Philosophy
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
Philosophy
"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
History
"I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers " there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
Literature
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