Quote

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

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
Like
Object
Drawer
Parts
Swiftly
However
Drawers
Awareness
Component
Objects
Components
Takes
Precise
Sense
Badly
Looks
Drawing
Woolly

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People only get really interesting when they start to rattle the bars of their cages.
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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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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: This too shall pass.
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What kills us isn't one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can't turn down for fear of disappointing others.
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The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.
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We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.
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Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.
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One of the best protections against disappointment is to have a lot going on.
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Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories: the story of our quest for sexual love and the story of our quest for love from the world.
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Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.
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The happiness that may emerge from taking a second look is central to Proust's therapeutic conception. It reveals the extent to which our dissatisfactions may be the result of failing to look properly at our lives rather than the result of anything inherently deficient about them.
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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?
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How generous was it to offer gifts to people one knew would never accept them?
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Rather than saying 'I hate mess', it might draw more compassion to say, 'mess terrifies me as a harbinger of catastrophe'.
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It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.
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Alcohol-inspired fights are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order.
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It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
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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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Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.
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