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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

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
Contemporary
Anxiety
Ambition
Handmaiden

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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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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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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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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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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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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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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.
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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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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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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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