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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.

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
Never
Kissing
Allow
Soon
Lead
Forget
Ungrateful
Two
Kiss
Feel
Extremes
Feels
Attractive

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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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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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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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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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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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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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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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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