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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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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Unfortunate
Tendency
Tendencies
System
Getting
People
Persuade

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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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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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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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