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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
Sense
Distorted
Everything
Radically
Must
Tedious
Condemn
Hence
Lack
Valuable
Simply
Perpetually
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Let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge, and you said, 'I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation I want to know how to live,' - they would show you the way to the insane asylum.
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Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.
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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
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Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
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Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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It's hard loving those who don't much like themselves: If you're so great, why would you think I'm so great.
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Love is an incurable disease. In love, there is permanent suffering. Those who love and those who are happy are not the same.
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As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.
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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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The activities of drawing, eating and drinking, all involve assimilations by the self of desirable elements from the world, a transfer of goodness from without to within.
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Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.
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Our bodies hold our minds hostage to their whims and rhythms.
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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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When you look at the Moon, you think, āIām really small. What are my problems?ā It sets things into perspective. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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