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The materialistic view of happiness of our age starkly revealed in our understanding of the word luxury.

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
Luxury
View
Views
Word
Understanding
Age
Starkly
Happiness
Materialistic
Revealed

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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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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.
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Serious journalists often imagine society is adrift because people don't know certain things. Yet often, they know but just don't care. So the task of serious journalism isn't just to lay out truths. It is to make vital truths compelling to a big audience.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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Envy: a confused, tangled guide to one's own ambitions.
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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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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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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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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming... If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
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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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Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.
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Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence no painting ever captures the whole.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
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Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.
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