Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
Alain de BottonSo many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de BottonOne wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
Alain de BottonWe might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.
Alain de Botton