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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.

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

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We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
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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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Dreams reveal we never quite get 'over' anything: it's all still in there somewhere.
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It is by finding out what something is not that one comes closest to understanding what it is.
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
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Our responses to the world are crucially moulded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others.
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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