Quote

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

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
Huge
Extending
Small
Composed
Might
Central
Sometimes
Chains
Outwards
Made
Curiosity
Hub
Distance
Pictured
Questions
Distances
Large
Blunt

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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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It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.
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A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.
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The difference between hope and despair is a different way of telling stories from the same facts.
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Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge.
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If one felt successful, there'd be so little incentive to be successful.
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We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide.
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Never too late to learn some embarrassingly basic, stupidly obvious things about oneself.
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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A good half of the art of living is resilience.
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Socrates, on being insulted in the marketplace, asked by a passerby, Don't you worry about being called names? retorted, Why? Do you think I should resent it if an ass had kicked me?
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The more closely we analyze what we consider 'sexy,' the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.
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Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.
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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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Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
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The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets - which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork.
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