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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.

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
Persons
Able
Neatly
Person
Caused
Believe
Divorce
Unhappy
Necessarily
Misery
Aren

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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
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On paper, being good sounds great but a lot depends on the atmosphere of the workplace or community we live in. We tend to become good or bad depending on the cues sent out within a particular space.
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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.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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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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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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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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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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