Quote

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.

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
Things
Build
Necklaces
Time
Necessary
Fugitive
Therefore
Beads
Danger
Connecting
Information
Chain
Wrong
Chains
Chance
Useless
Necklace
Without
Travel
Receptivity

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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
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Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.
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Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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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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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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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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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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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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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
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In the works of Lucretius, we find two reasons why we shouldn't worry about death. If you have had a successful life, Lucretius tell us, there's no reason to mind its end. And, if you haven't had a good time, Why do you seek to add more years, which would also pass but ill?
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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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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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