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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: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Forgiveness
Sign
Requires
Suffering
Rather
Sense
Malice
Behaviour

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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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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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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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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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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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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
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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The more dignity is widely and freely available in a society, the less people want to be famous.
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The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
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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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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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