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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

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
Life
Otherwise
Dangerous
Worry
Apprehending
Though
Gloom
Enjoy
Continuous
May
Enjoying
Feel
Enjoyment
Feels
Anxiety

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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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Being funny should be an incidental byproduct of trying to get to something truthful, not a destination in itself.
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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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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
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One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us happy.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.
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The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.
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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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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane’s ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us.” P. 38-39
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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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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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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
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Gaffe-focused journalism: revenge of intelligent people who know true evils are out there but lack the access/time to get to them.
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