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Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.

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
Strive
Trying
Crazy
Control
Knowing
Fact
Facts
Warn
Striving
Keep
Maturity
Others

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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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.
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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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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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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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Most of us still caged within careers chosen for us by our not entirely worldly 18-22 year old selves.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.
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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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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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How do the stems connect to the roots?' 'Where is the mist coming from?' 'Why does one tree seem darker than another?' These questions are implicitly asked and answered in the process of sketching.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.
Alain de Botton
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain de Botton
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain de Botton
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
Alain de Botton
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The best cure for one's bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.
Alain de Botton