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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
Reverence
Devotion
Religion
Art
World
Touchstone
Touchstones
Replaced

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain de Botton
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
Alain de Botton
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
Alain de Botton
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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
Alain de Botton
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
Alain de Botton
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
Alain de Botton
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain de Botton
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
Alain de Botton
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
Alain de Botton
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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
Alain de Botton
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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.
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.
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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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
Alain de Botton
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
Alain de Botton
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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.
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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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
Alain de Botton