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What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?

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
Thinking
Supposed
Think

More quotes by Alain de Botton

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Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.
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Unhappiness can stem from having only one perspective to play with.
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Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.
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The most unbearable thing about many successful people is not - as we flatteringly think - how lazy they are, but how hard they work.
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Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money.
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A lump rises in our throat at the sight of beauty from an implicit knowledge that the happiness it hints at is the exception.
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Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter-of-fact, stoic yet at heart she was the oppo site: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
Alain de Botton
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Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.
Alain de Botton
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The dream of the news is that it makes us care about other people and situations. But we cannot identify with people to whom we haven't been introduced. Humans will only respond to art, to people who are skilled in making you care.
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Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities.
Alain de Botton
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
Alain de Botton
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Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.
Alain de Botton
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To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one's ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.
Alain de Botton
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There is a devilishly direct relationship between the significance of an idea and how nervous we become at the prospect of having to think about it.
Alain de Botton
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The degree of sympathy we feel regarding another's fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake.
Alain de Botton
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There is always the option of being emotionally lazy, that is, of quoting.
Alain de Botton
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There is real danger of a disconnect between what's on your business card and who you are deep inside, and it's not a disconnect that the world is ready to be patient with.
Alain de Botton
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The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.
Alain de Botton
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The longing for a destiny is no nowhere stronger than in our romantic life. All too often forced to share our bed with those who cannot fathom our soul, can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams.
Alain de Botton
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What is fascinating about marriage is why anyone wants to get married.
Alain de Botton