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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?
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
World
Madness
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Morality
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States
Contentment
Life
Basis
More quotes by Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
Alain de Botton
It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
Alain de Botton
I feel that the great challenge of our time is the communication of ideas.
Alain de Botton
Social media has lots of benefits, but compared to Christianity, it tends to group people by interests. Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human.
Alain de Botton
The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton
True love is a lack of desire to check one's smartphone in another's presence.
Alain de Botton
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.
Alain de Botton
Politics is so difficult, it's generally only people who aren't quite up to the task who feel convinced they are.
Alain de Botton
One of the unexpectedly important things that art can do for us is to teach us how to suffer more successfully.
Alain de Botton
Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
Alain de Botton
Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.
Alain de Botton
Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
Alain de Botton
To be shown love is to feel ourselves the object of concern: our presence is noted, our name is registered, our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to. And under such care, we flourish.
Alain de Botton
We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
Alain de Botton
Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
Alain de Botton
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
Alain de Botton
Because the rhythm of conversation makes no allowance for dead periods, because the presence of others calls for continuous responses, we are left to regret the inanity of what we say, and the missed opportunity of what we do not.
Alain de Botton
