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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
Tendency
Tendencies
System
Getting
People
Persuade
Unfortunate

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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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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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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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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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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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Why, then, if expensive things cannot bring us remarkable joy, are we so powerfully drawn to them?
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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.
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We should not be frightened by appearances.
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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.
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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.
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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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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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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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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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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