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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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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?
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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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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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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.
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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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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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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
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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
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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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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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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.
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