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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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
Help
Recognise
Helping
Brushes
Seems
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Important
Defeated
Things
Benefit
Near
Disaster
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Brush
More quotes by Alain de Botton
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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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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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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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
Alain de Botton
Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
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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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It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
Alain de Botton
He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
Alain de Botton
Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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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.
Alain de Botton
A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
Alain de Botton
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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