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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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
Valuable
Simply
Perpetually
Sense
Distorted
Everything
Radically
Must
Tedious
Condemn
Hence
Lack
More quotes by Alain de Botton
The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.
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...if the beginnings of love and amorous politics are equally rosy, then the ends may be equally bloody.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
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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.
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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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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?
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The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly.
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The moment we cry in a film is not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected them to be.
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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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In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
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For all his understanding of worldly concerns, when it came to fathoming the deeper meaning of his own furious activity, Sir Bob displayed the sort of laziness for which he himself had no patience in others. He appeared to have only a passing interest in the overall purpose of his financial accumulation.
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It's very hard to respect people on holiday - everybody looks so silly at the beach, it makes you hate humanity - but when you see people at their work they elicit respect, whether it's a mechanic, a stonemason or an accountant.
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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
There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others - because it's a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
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We don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped ... We suffer, therefore we think.
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It wasn't only fanatics and drunkards who began conversations with strangers in public.
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