Quote

We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.

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
Would
Destroy
Tests
Survival
Tried
Capacity
Safe
Another
Test
Wanted
Vain

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest - in all its ardour and paradoxes - than our travels.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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The fear of saying something stupid (which stupid people never have) has censored far more good ideas than bad ones.
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It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
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Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
Alain de Botton
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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.
Alain de Botton
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
Alain de Botton
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
Alain de Botton
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
Alain de Botton
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Much of the really serious trouble in the world gets going with a sense of humiliation.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
Alain de Botton