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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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Alain de Botton
Age: 54
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Feeling
Lost
Feelings
Reason
Belongs
Much
Optimism
Good
Desperate
Life
Certainty
Crazy

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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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.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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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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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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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.
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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.
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
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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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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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Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
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We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.
Alain de Botton