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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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Getting
People
Persuade
Unfortunate
Tendency
Tendencies
System

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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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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.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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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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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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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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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
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