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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
Beneath
Standards
High
Awkwardly
Cynics
Idealists
Idealist

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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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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.
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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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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
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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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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
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It's as though either you accept [religious] doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart.
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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
Alain de Botton
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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
Alain de Botton
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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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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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