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

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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Only as we mature does affection begin to depend on achievement.
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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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For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wisebaden, and Louyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.
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Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our own prized internal song. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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I thought about societies where exceptional fortunes are built up in industries with very little connection to out sincere and significant needs, industries where it is difficult to escape from the disparity between a seriousness of means and a triviality of ends.
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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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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.
Alain de Botton
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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I assemble my ideas in pieces on a computer file, then gradually find a place for them on a piece of scaffolding I erect.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
Alain de Botton
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.
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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.
Alain de Botton