Quote

On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.

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
Within
Workplace
Community
Sent
Space
Atmosphere
Sound
Sounds
Become
Tend
Live
Paper
Great
Depends
Cues
Good
Particular
Depending

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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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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.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.
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The problem isn't so much finding good ideas (there is no shortage) as embedding the ones we have into everyday practice.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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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.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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