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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Books
Booksellers
Written
Authors
Anyone
Destination
Talk
Valuable
Given
Lonely
Find
Couldn
Book
Writing
Numbers

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Alain de Botton
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
Alain de Botton
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton