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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.

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
Jobs
Stills
Still
Enough
Devote
Work
Practically
Good
Attractive
Life
Entire
Balance

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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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Year-end financial statements express a truth about office life which is no less irrefutable yet also, in the end, no less irrelevant or irritating than an evolutionary biologist's proud reminder that the purpose of existence lies in the propagation of our genes.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.
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I think people want to get married to end their emotional uncertainty. In a way, they want to end powerful feelings, or certainly the negative ones.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
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