Quote

Our disrespect for thinking: someone sitting in a chair, gazing out of a window blankly, always described as 'doing nothing'.

Alain de Botton

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Alain de Botton
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 20
Journalist
Philosopher
Publisher
Writer
City of Zurich
Alain De Botton
Described
Thinking
Chair
Chairs
Window
Sitting
Blankly
Someone
Gazing
Nothing
Disrespect
Always

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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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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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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?
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People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
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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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Choosing a spouse and a choosing career: the two great decisions for which society refuses to set up institutional guidance.
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Must being in love always mean being in pain?
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.
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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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A successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator.
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A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.
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Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.
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Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them.
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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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