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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

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
Awkwardly
Cynics
Idealists
Idealist
Beneath
Standards
High

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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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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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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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One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
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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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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
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When you look at the Moon, you think, ‘I’m really small. What are my problems?’ It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton