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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Parents
Parent
Character
Trying
Would
Rescued
Traits
Develop
Adults

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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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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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What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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Good sex isn't just fun, it keeps us sane and happy. Having sex with someone makes us feel wanted, alive and potent.
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In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer's words, to turn pain into knowledge.
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The telephone becomes an instrument of torture in the demonic hands of a beloved who doesn't call.
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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.
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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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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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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
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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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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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What should worry us is not the number of people that oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so.
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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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