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Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

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
Practice
Less
Easy
Violin
Wells
Contentment
Well
Content
Requires
Perhaps
Playing

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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
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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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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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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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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
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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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The genius of religions is that they structure the inner life.
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I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Alain de Botton
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren't there. The answers are there in the morning.
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Art cannot single-handedly create enthusiasm... it merely contributes to enthusiasm and guides us to be more conscious of feelings that we might previously have experienced only tentatively or hurriedly.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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