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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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Reverence
Devotion
Religion
Art
World
Touchstone
Touchstones
Replaced

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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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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.
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
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Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own - but that we could never have described on our own.
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On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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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.
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
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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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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
Alain de Botton
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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
Alain de Botton
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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