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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: 54
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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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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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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We keep a special place in our hearts for people who refuse to be impressed by us.
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Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books that were written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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Not everyone is worth listening to.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
Alain de Botton
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
Alain de Botton
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton
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By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
Alain de Botton