Quote

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.

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
Deeper
Lessons
Sensitized
Books
Enable
Read
Sink
Book
Missed
Things
Pairs
Would
Glasses
Otherwise

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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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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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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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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.
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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It should not be Illiers-Combray that we visit: a genuine homage to Proust would be to look at our world through his eyes, not look at his world through our eyes.
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
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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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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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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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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
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An argument in a couple: 2 people attempting to introduce each other to important truths - by panicked shouting.
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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