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Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

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
Minutes
Longer
Impossible
Happiness
Else
Descendants
Worried
Creatures

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.
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The only possible way to begin a book is to tell oneself that its eventual failure is guaranteed — but survivable.
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Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.
Alain de Botton
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgements of those we live among.
Alain de Botton
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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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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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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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.
Alain de Botton
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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 should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
Alain de Botton
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
Alain de Botton
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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.
Alain de Botton
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Memory is... similar to anticipation: an instrument of simplification and selection.
Alain de Botton
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Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.
Alain de Botton
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We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
Alain de Botton
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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.
Alain de Botton
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The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
Alain de Botton