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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

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
Malice
Behaviour
Forgiveness
Sign
Requires
Suffering
Rather
Sense

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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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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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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.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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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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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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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.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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Most of our childhood is stored not in photos, but in certain biscuits, lights of day, smells, textures of carpet.
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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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