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Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn't know rejection and humiliation so intimately.

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
Wouldn
Might
Invulnerable
Without
Dangerously
Believe
Intimately
Would
Humiliation
Rejection
Ridiculous
Sex

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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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The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone.
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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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We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.
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I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.
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We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.
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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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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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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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Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread
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The good parent: someone who doesn't mind, for a time, being hated by their children.
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It is perhaps sad books that best console us when we are sad.
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Bad art might be defined as a series of bad choices about what to show and what to leave out.
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Rather than employing it as a supplement to active, conscious seeing, they used the medium as a substitute, paying less attention to the world than they had done previously, taking it on faith that photography automatically assured them possession of it.
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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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Religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone they're for all of us.
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Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically teaches viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.
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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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