Quote

Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.

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
Conversation
Continuous
Dead
Missed
Opportunity
Calls
Left
Rhythm
Makes
Presence
Others
Response
Inanity
Regret
Allowance
Periods
Responses

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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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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.
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
Alain de Botton
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Alain de Botton