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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
People
Persuade
Unfortunate
Tendency
Tendencies
System
Getting

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
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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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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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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.
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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Objectively good spaces to work rarely end up being so in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studios have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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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