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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

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
Receptive
Likely
Perhaps
Lives
Beautiful
Things
Problematic

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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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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.
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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.
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
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For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
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Responsible for wrapping the iron fist of authority in its velvet glove is Jane Axtell, head of the accountancy firm's Human Resources department.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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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.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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It would be foolish to describe the logistics hub as merely ugly, for it has the horrifying, soulless, immaculate beauty characteristic of many of the workplaces of the modern world.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.
Alain de Botton
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Alain de Botton
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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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The lesson? To respond to the unexpected and hurtful behavior of others with something more than a wipe of the glasses, to see it as a chance to expand our understanding.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
Alain de Botton