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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Annoying
Significant
Looking
Learn
May
Things
People
Annoys

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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Endeavoring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
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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.
Alain de Botton
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What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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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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Life gives us no such handy markers - a storm comes, and far from this being a harbinger of death and collapse, during its course a person discovers love and truth, beauty and happiness, the rain lashing at the windows all the while.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
Alain de Botton
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
Alain de Botton
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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
Alain de Botton
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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
Alain de Botton
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
Alain de Botton
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I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
Alain de Botton