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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain de Botton
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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Excuse
Relationship
Stop
Actually
Perfect
Living
Jobs
Learnt
More quotes by Alain de Botton
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
The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
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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.
Alain de Botton
Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
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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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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
Alain de Botton
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
Alain de Botton