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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
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Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
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Defeated
Things
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More quotes by Alain de Botton
Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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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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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
Alain de Botton
Not everyone is worth listening to.
Alain de Botton
Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
Alain de Botton
It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
Alain de Botton
I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
Alain de Botton
The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
Alain de Botton
Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
Alain de Botton
