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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.

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
Emotion
Notorious
Animal
Inability
Makes
Suicide
Human
Emotions
Humans
Express
Animals
Beings
Capable

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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
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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.
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One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.
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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.
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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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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.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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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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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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