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So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

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
Many
Mortal
Ignored
Indifferent
Fragile
Mortals
Boil
Ego
Ache
Vast
Complaints
Universe
Belly

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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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There's a whole category of people who miss out by not allowing themselves to be weird enough.
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Our greatest furies spring from events which violate our sense of the ground of our existence.
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We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.
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We often lose our tempers not with those who are actually to blame just with those who love us enough to forgive us our foul moods.
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Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
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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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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.
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Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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It was no longer her absence that wounded me, but my growing indifference to it. Forgetting, however calming, was also a reminder of infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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to design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light of turning on a tap
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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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At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.
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When I see someone like Richard Dawkins, I see my father. I grew up with that. I'm basically the child of Richard Dawkins.
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