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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.

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
World
Touchstone
Touchstones
Replaced
Reverence
Devotion
Religion
Art

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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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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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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
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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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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 more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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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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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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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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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
Alain de Botton
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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 more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.
Alain de Botton