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

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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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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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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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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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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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These inventors were elevating the formulation of entrepreneurial ideas to the status of a visionary activity. Though forced to justify their efforts in the pragmatic language of venture capital, they were at heart utopian thinkers intent on transforming the world.
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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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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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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.
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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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As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.
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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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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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