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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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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Intelligent
Disease
Awareness
Capable
Anyone
Never
Love
Insanity
Saved

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
Alain de Botton
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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
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
Alain de Botton
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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
Alain de Botton
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
Alain de Botton
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
Alain de Botton
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
Alain de Botton
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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
Alain de Botton
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Alain de Botton
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
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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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
Alain de Botton
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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
Alain de Botton