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

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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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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Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.
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It would scarcely be acceptable, for example, to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.
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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 am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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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.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.
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Unnatural to expect that learning to be happy should be any easier than, say, learning to play the violin or require any less practice.
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The architects who benefit us most maybe those generous enough to lay aside their claims to genius in order to devote themselves to assembling graceful but predominantly unoriginal boxes. Architecture should have the confidence and the kindness to be a little boring.
Alain de Botton
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The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.
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.
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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.
Alain de Botton
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
Alain de Botton
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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
Alain de Botton