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"It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other's imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes - hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways - and that's okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we're all these incredibly fragile beings."
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"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."

"Man loves pleasure. But women desire purposeful commitment."

"Enemies are often former or potential friends who have been denied - or think that they have been denied - something."

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

"Just because our friendship has changed and now we grow in different directions, does not mean that we have to grow apart."

"I just want one person I can rescue and I want one person who needs me. Who can't live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time."

"And someone he scarcely knew moved towards him and knelt beside him and whispered, 'Sir, was you calling out for me? Sir, I know I know,' and touched him."
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."

"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."

"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."

"A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain."

"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."

"What makes the prospect of death distinctive in the modern age is the background of permanent technological and sociological revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any possible faith in the permanence of our labours. Our ancestors could believe that their achievements had a chance of bearing up against the flow of events. We know time to be a hurricane. Our buildings, our sense of style, our ideas, all of these will soon enough be anachronisms, and the machines in which we now take inordinate pride will seem no less bathetic than Yorick's skull."

"If you are pro love, you have to be a little bit disloyal to the romantic feelings that propel you in the early days."
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