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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about 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
Nervous
Direct
Relationship
Idea
Become
Ideas
Think
Prospect
Thinking
Significance

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We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.
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One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.
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There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
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Writing isn’t a career choice. It’s self-medication that over time precipitates the madness it was meant to ward off.
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as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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Despite its maddeningly vague, inarticulate form, anxiety is almost always trying to tell you something useful and apposite.
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Happiness may be difficult to obtain. The obstacles are not primarily financial.
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In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.
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To one's enemies: I hate myself more than you ever could.
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It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.
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We may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it.
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The media insists on taking what someone didn't mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.
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Many moments in religion seem attractive to me even though I can't believe in any of it.
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Architects themselves tend to shy away from the word, preferring instead to talk about the manipulation of space.
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Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter - pleasurable, intoxicating, even - with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.
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The only way to be happy is to realise how much depends on how you look at things
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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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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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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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