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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

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
Matter
Much
Think
Thinking
People
Seldom
Reputation
Matters

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. One can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit.
Alain de Botton
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
Alain de Botton
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I know a lot about writing, but I don't know much about how other industries work. I've tried to use my naivety to my advantage.
Alain de Botton
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It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane.
Alain de Botton
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
Alain de Botton
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As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.
Alain de Botton
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what we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. (p123) Architecture of Happiness
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.
Alain de Botton
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
Alain de Botton
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
Alain de Botton
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
Alain de Botton
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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
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The arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
Alain de Botton
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
Alain de Botton
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According to Montaigne, it was the oppressive notion that we had complete mental control over our bodies, and the horror of departing from this portrait of normality, that had left the man unable to perform sexually.
Alain de Botton
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
Alain de Botton
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The challenge for a human now is to be more interesting to another than his or her smartphone.
Alain de Botton
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
Alain de Botton
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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
Alain de Botton
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When work is not going well, it's useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers - and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever.
Alain de Botton