Quote

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.

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
Travel
Encountering
Saws
Mattered
Hold
Urge
Beauty
Urges
Wish
Dominant
Give
Possess
Giving
Impulse
Life
Weight

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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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The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.
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To cut out every negative root would simultaneously mean choking off positive elements that might arise from it further up the stem of the plant. We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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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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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
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It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
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Philosophy had supplied Socrates with convictions in which he had been able to have rational, as opposed to hysterical, confidence when faced with disapproval.
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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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