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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: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
High
Awkwardly
Cynics
Idealists
Idealist
Beneath
Standards

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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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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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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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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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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
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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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Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
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Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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