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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.

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
Courage
Overlooked
Belief
Prose
Simpleminded
Nothing
Simplicity
Impassable
Writing
Protection
Unparalleled
Requires
Dismissed
Intelligence
Tenacious
Offers
Incomprehensible
Danger
Hallmark

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
Alain de Botton
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One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
Alain de Botton
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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
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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
Alain de Botton
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alain de Botton