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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.

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
Humiliation
Publishers
Bankrupted
Private
Venue
Filled
Tours
Almost
Publisher
Waiting
Venues
People
Jet
Hired

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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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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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Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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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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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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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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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 went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
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Arguments are like eels: however logical, they may slip from the minds weak grasp unless fixed there by imagery and style.
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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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