It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Alain De BottonRead
The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
Interpretation
In today's world, maintaining interesting relationships can be challenging due to distractions like smartphones.
Alain De Botton highlights the struggle of modern relationships, where the constant presence of smartphones can often overshadow personal connections. This quote emphasizes the importance of engaging in meaningful interactions to capture and retain the interest of one's partner amidst digital distractions.
In practice
In a speech about modern love, you can quote De Botton to illustrate how technology impacts relationships.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
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.
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.
My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.
but something always went wrong, and the relationship would end precisely at the moment when she was sure that this was the person with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life. After a long time, she came to the conclusion that men brought only pain, frustration, suffering and a sense of time dragging.
I find that in this day and generation, the meanest men have the lowest estimate of woman; that the greater the man is, the grander he is, the more he thinks of mother, wife and daughter.
Forget sex or politics or religion, loneliness is the subject that clears out a room.
If anyone conceives, that an object of his love joins itself to another with closer bonds of friendship than he himself has attained to, he will be affected with hatred towards the loved object and with envy towards his rival.
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