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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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
Hard
Silly
Work
Respect
People
Humanity
Elicit
Everybody
Accountant
Whether
Accountants
Hate
Mechanic
Makes
Holiday
Looks
Beach
More quotes by Alain de Botton
Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
Alain de Botton
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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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
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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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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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.
Alain de Botton
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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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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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
Alain de Botton
We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Alain de Botton
Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
Alain de Botton
Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
Alain de Botton
