Quote

what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness

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
Place
Architecture
Ignores
Home
Available
Succeeds
Self
Merely
Wider
Important
Succeed
Selves
World
Trouble
Distracted
Call
Onto
Happiness
Truths
Making
Holding
Irresolute

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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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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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We are sad at home and blame the weather and the ugliness of the buildings, but on the tropical island we learn that the state of the skies and the appearance of our dwellings can never on their own underwrite our joy nor condemn us to misery.
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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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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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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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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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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 striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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Curiosity takes ignorance seriously - and is confident enough to admit when it's in the dark. It is aware of not knowing. And then it sets out to do something about it.
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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 degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
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