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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.

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
Open
Magazine
Successful
Priorities
Care
Magazines
Take
Newspapers
Life
Deeply
Unhelpful
Pick
Bombarded
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Projects
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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