Quote

One of our major flaws, and causes of unhappiness, is that we find it hard to take note of appreciate and be grateful for what is always around us. We suffer because we lose sight of the value of what is before us and yearn, often unfairly, for the imagined attraction elsewhere.

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
Values
Grateful
Note
Often
Appreciate
Elsewhere
Around
Sight
Attraction
Find
Value
Suffer
Unfairly
Take
Lose
Majors
Yearn
Hard
Loses
Notes
Imagined
Always
Causes
Major
Unhappiness
Suffering
Gratitude
Flaws

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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By travelling across frontiers, on horseback and in the imagination, Montaigne invited us to to exchange local prejudices and the self division they induced for less constraining identities as citizens of the world.
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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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As an atheist, I think there are lots of things religions get up to which are of value to non-believers - and one of those things is trying to be a bit better than we normally manage to be.
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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living it's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.
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I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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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.
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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.
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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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You normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point of daffodils, sunsets and uneventful nice days.
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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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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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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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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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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We read the weird tales in newspapers to crowd out the even weirder stuff inside us.
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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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Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few that hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognize by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without.
Alain de Botton