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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

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
Moments
Book
Right
Good
Reading
Moment
Makes

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Don't despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don't - surrender to events with hope.
Alain de Botton
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
Alain de Botton
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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
Alain de Botton
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
Alain de Botton
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
Alain de Botton
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
Alain de Botton
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
Alain de Botton
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Alain de Botton
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
Alain de Botton
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
Alain de Botton
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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
Alain de Botton
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
Alain de Botton
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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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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
Alain de Botton
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Alain de Botton
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
Alain de Botton