Quote

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.

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
Come
Uses
Complete
Anybody
Takes
Vision
Small
Use
Snobbery
Part
Snob

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
Alain de Botton
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
Alain de Botton
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Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
Alain de Botton
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.
Alain de Botton
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
Alain de Botton
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I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
Alain de Botton
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
Alain de Botton
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Alain de Botton
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
Alain de Botton
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
Alain de Botton
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My writing always came out of a very personal place, out of an attempt to stay sane.
Alain de Botton
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
Alain de Botton
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
Alain de Botton
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
Alain de Botton