Quote

Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

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
Losing
Intellectual
Mystery
Objects
Loss
Disappearance
Much
Distress
Frustration
Object

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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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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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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Pick up any newspaper or magazine, open the TV, and you'll be bombarded with suggestions of how to have a successful life. Some of these suggestions are deeply unhelpful to our own projects and priorities - and we should take care.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
Alain de Botton
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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
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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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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
Alain de Botton
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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.
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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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