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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.

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
Money
Paying
Glorious
Punishment
Worthy
Gratitude
Taxes
Civic
Duty
Civics
Making
Framed

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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where ordinary life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.
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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
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The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem to be so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives.
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It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
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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.
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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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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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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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The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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I went to church and couldn't swallow it. The music was nice but I don't belong there.
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There are people who say, 'Oh this guy is quite thick.' I think the reason is that, increasingly, I don't mind being simple in terms of literary expression. Others say, 'No, no, no. He went to Cambridge. He got a good degree. He must be Einstein.'
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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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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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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