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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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Near
Disaster
Embittered
Benefits
Brush
Help
Recognise
Helping
Brushes
Seems
Fatal
Important
Defeated
Things
Benefit
More quotes by Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain de Botton
The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
Alain de Botton
We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
Alain de Botton
Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
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
Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
Alain de Botton
Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
Alain de Botton
Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
Alain de Botton
Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
Alain de Botton
After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
Alain de Botton
It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain de Botton
It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
Alain de Botton
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
I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
Alain de Botton
The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
Alain de Botton
Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
Alain de Botton
One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Alain de Botton
I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
Alain de Botton
Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
Alain de Botton
