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I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.

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
Things
Laugh
Terrifying
Life
General
Bare
Darkness
Utterly
Laughing
Precisely
Facts
Optimistic
Persons
Nervous
Person
Laughter
Trenches
Take
Indeed
Pessimistic

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Our sense of what is valuable will hence be radically distorted if we must perpetually condemn as tedious everything we lack, simply because we lack it.
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A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
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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 arrogance that says analysing the relationship between reasons and causes is more important than writing a philosophy of shyness or sadness or friendship drives me nuts. I can't accept that.
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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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We accept the need to train extensively to fly a plane but think instinct should be enough for marrying and raising kids.
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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease.
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There are selections so acute that they come to define a place, with the result that we can no longer travel through that landscape without being reminded of what a great artist noticed there.
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Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
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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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