Quote

The inability to live in the present lies in the fear of leaving the sheltered position of anticipation or memory, and so of admitting that this is the only life that one is ever likely (heavenly intervention aside) to live.

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
Life
Lies
Intervention
Memories
Anticipation
Position
Inability
Present
Aside
Lying
Heavenly
Fear
Likely
Ever
Leaving
Sheltered
Live
Memory
Admitting

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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
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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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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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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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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
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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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Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
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