Quote

The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.

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
Looks
Second
Reveals
Results
Properly
Happiness
Conception
Deficient
Rather
Central
Proust
Lives
Extent
Therapeutic
Anything
Result
Dissatisfaction
May
Failing
Inherently
Look
Taking
Emerge

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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.
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Work is most fulfilling when you're at the comfortable, exciting edge of not quite knowing what you are doing.
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When Proust urges us to evaluate the world properly, he repeatedly reminds us of the value of modest scenes.
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Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendencies which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who we are and what will satisfy us.
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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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We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
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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 blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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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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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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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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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad, and to lonely service stations that we should drive when there is no one for us to hold or love.
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