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We need objects to remind us of the commitments we've made. That carpet from Morocco reminds us of the impulsive, freedom-loving side of ourselves we're in danger of losing touch with. Beautiful furniture gives us something to live up to. All designed objects are propaganda for a way of life.

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
Giving
Danger
Remind
Needs
Gives
Propaganda
Morocco
Made
Side
Designed
Impulsive
Something
Sides
Loving
Commitments
Way
Freedom
Touch
Consumerism
Life
Beautiful
Commitment
Reminds
Live
Losing
Carpet
Need
Objects
Furniture

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The Arab-Israeli conflict is also in many ways a conflict about status: it's a war between two peoples who feel deeply humiliated by the other, who want the other to respect them. Battles over status can be even more intractable than those over land or water or oil.
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It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.
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In a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion.
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There is no such thing as work-life balance. Everything worth fighting for unbalances your life.
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All tours are filled with humiliation. My publisher once hired a private jet to fly me to a venue where 1,000 people were waiting. It almost bankrupted him.
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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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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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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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The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.
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True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.
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I was uncomfortable writing fiction. My love was the personal essay rather than the novel.
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Forcing people to eat together is an effective way to promote tolerance.
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Let death find us as we are building up our matchstick protests against its waves.
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He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan.
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We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
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The only people we can think of as normal are those we don't yet know very well.
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What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
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