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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
Significant
Looking
Learn
May
Things
People
Annoys
Annoying

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton
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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
Alain de Botton
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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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It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not the domestic setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, who may not be who we essentially are.
Alain de Botton
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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
Alain de Botton
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He was marked out by his relentless ability to find fault with others' mediocrity - suggesting that a certain type of intelligence may be at heart nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
Alain de Botton
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
Alain de Botton
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
Alain de Botton
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
Alain de Botton
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Alain de Botton
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Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them.
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
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
Alain de Botton
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
Alain de Botton
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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.
Alain de Botton
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
Alain de Botton
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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
Alain de Botton