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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
Jobs
Learnt
Excuse
Relationship
Stop
Actually
Perfect
Living

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
Alain de Botton
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Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
Alain de Botton
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
Alain de Botton
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
Alain de Botton
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
Alain de Botton
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
Alain de Botton
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
Alain de Botton
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
Alain de Botton
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
Alain de Botton
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
Alain de Botton
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
Alain de Botton
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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
Alain de Botton
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
Alain de Botton
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
Alain de Botton
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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
Alain de Botton
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
Alain de Botton