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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
Art
World
Touchstone
Touchstones
Replaced
Reverence
Devotion
Religion

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
Alain de Botton
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Alain de Botton
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
Alain de Botton
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
Alain de Botton
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
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He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Alain de Botton
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
Alain de Botton
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
Alain de Botton
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A simple problem of arithmetic: there are far more ambitions than there are grand destinies available.
Alain de Botton
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.
Alain de Botton
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
Alain de Botton
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
Alain de Botton
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
Alain de Botton
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
Alain de Botton
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
Alain de Botton
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
Alain de Botton
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It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
Alain de Botton