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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.

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
Different
Way
Despair
Telling
Difference
Differences
Hope
Facts
Stories

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
Alain de Botton
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
Alain de Botton
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People who readily accept the need for a gym will resist that their personalities might need some work too.
Alain de Botton
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
Alain de Botton
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
Alain de Botton
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
Alain de Botton
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Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
Alain de Botton
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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
Alain de Botton
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
Alain de Botton
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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
Alain de Botton
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We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Alain de Botton