Quote

The company of certain people may excite our generosity and sensitivity, while that of others awakens our competitiveness and envy.

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
People
Competitiveness
Sensitivity
Generosity
Envy
Company
Others
Certain
Awakens
May
Excite

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You have to be quite heavily invested in someone to do them the honour of telling them you're annoyed with them.
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Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.
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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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The longing for destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life.
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Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.
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Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.
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Maturity: the confidence to have no opinions on many things.
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One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.
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For paranoia about 'what other people think' : remember that only some hate, a very few love - and almost all just don't care.
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Most good thinking has its origin in fear.
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Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.
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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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Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts.
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In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
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Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person.
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Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand.
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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.
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Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.
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