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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
Things
Benefit
Near
Disaster
Embittered
Benefits
Brush
Help
Recognise
Helping
Brushes
Seems
Fatal
Important
Defeated

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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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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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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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You need a long hard day's work to reveal the logic of the craving for very bad tv and alcohol.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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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 blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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