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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.

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
Notion
Portraits
Control
Unable
Left
Perform
Montaigne
Body
Bodies
Departing
Men
According
Normality
Love
Mental
Oppressive
Complete
Portrait
Horror
Sexually

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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about 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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Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
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I was foreign and Jewish, with a funny name, and was very small and hated sport, a real problem at an English prep school. So the way to get round it was to become the school joker, which I did quite effectively - I was always fooling around to make the people who would otherwise dump me in the loo laugh.
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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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I'm also interested in the modern suggestion that you can have a combination of love and sex in a marriage - which no previous society has ever believed.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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I passionately believe that's it's not just what you say that counts, it's also how you say it - that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.
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If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
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Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
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The problem is if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication … believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.
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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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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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Most anger stems from feelings of weakness, sadness and fear: hard to remember when one is at the receiving end of its defiant roar.
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Mental health: having enough safe places in your mind for your thoughts to settle.
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