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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.

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
Stronger
Life
Nowhere
Longing
Romantic
Destiny

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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
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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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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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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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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
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It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
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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.
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
Alain de Botton