Quote

Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.

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
Understand
Existing
Speak
Properly
True
Essence
Cannot
Exist
Someone
Perhaps
Really
Loved
Saying
Alive
Wholly

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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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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.
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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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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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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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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.
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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